From: David Ensteness (denstene_at_mac.com)
Date: Sat Feb 14 2004 - 15:32:01 PST
Jeff,
First, get a lot of source work on the history of the Newton because a lot of the information is foggy and the more you gather the better your understanding will be. The Newton really matured as a concept from its beginnings.
If you don't have any first hand experience with the various Newton products, man, well, when it comes down to it I would tell you that the best way to complete your project would be to go buy a 2100 and a keyboard and write your project on it. But thing is, you would really want a 2100, a 120, and an Original MessagePad in order to give you a pretty decent understanding of the product's evolution, and well, that gets really expensive.
Most of the traffic on this list is about the MessagePad 2x00 series of Newtons, the 2000 and the 2100. The only difference between the two models is the amount of internal storage RAM. Many 2000s were also upgraded through a program Apple offered, once sent in for the upgrade they had the exact same specs as the 2100 so the only difference was the name on the plastics. The 2x00 series is really the most capable all around. By the time the Newton OS had hit 2.1 it had really matured and while some of it looks similar to Newton OS 1.0 its a lot like comparing Mac OS 7.1 to Mac OS 9.1, its a world of difference. The advancements in the Newton OS allowed for exceptional handwriting recognition, a vast array of software, and internet connectivity. If you are interested in the history of the platform you will want to learn about each of the three generations of the Newton: the Original MessagePad (OMP) and 100, the 110, 120a, 120b, and 130, and the 2000, 2100, and eMate. If you are going to focus more so on the c
urrent status of the Newton most of your attention will need to be directed at the 2x00 series, the eMate, and how for Newton users the 1x0 series basically replaces the Palm Pilot.
From the beginning the Newton MessagePad was able to use a wide range of communication methods including e-mail, infra-red beaming, faxing, AppleTalk networking, printing via Serial, AppleTalk, or IR, and even the receiving of pages via a paging service and pager attachment. Howevever, many of these were of little use in 1994 when e-mail was not exactly the killer application it has been for the past several years, networks were not pervasive, and paper was still a primary method of information transfer.
With the 2x00 series a lot had changed. First of all it was 1996 now and so the internet was a driving force at last. Networks would come of age within two years in a wide spread way. Student or business man, you now needed all those communication options. So just what can the 2x00 MessagePads do? More than one would think. Here is a partial list of highlights:
MP3 Playback
Office Suite Applications including word processing, databases, spreadsheets, painting and drawing programs
Ethernet networking via readily available PCMCIA cards
Wireless networking via readily available PCMCIA cards
E-mail - both POP and IMAP
Web browsing - less of a bonus now as the web is almost all picture based, but basically if it looks good on a Palm, PocketPC, or phone, it will look fine on your Newton too, so for checking stocks, the headlines, whatever, its a nice platform
Web serving - amazed yet? you can and many people do, run webservers from their Newton
Terminal emulation - ever want to administer networking equipment without a terminal or a laptop? Just plug your Newton in.
Those are some of the exciting technologies and software that is currently available to a Newton user. But that doesn't really answer why the platform is still being supported so well. To be honest, the answer is really pretty circular. Like you I am not all that old and didn't discover the Newton until I was finishing college, just a couple years after the product line had been killed. Not the best timing right? Well, actually, it worked out pretty well. There is move available for the Newton now in most areas than there was when it was a supported product. Here comes the circular part. Newton users were fanatical. Like early Mac users Newton users saw a device that was under powered and hobbled in several ways [the OMP] and yet, that device could still do things that were simply undoable just days before. Even hobbled it had more to offer than anything else. Now over the next couple years of Newton development those users expanded their numbers and the platform became widely viable for both Macintosh and (
believe it or not) Windows users since the Newton was a cross-platform device.
The Newton developed at a good time, lots of interest in user groups, the early development of the internet. The community that exists today is primarily an extension of what was then. But in many ways the Newton community has more to offer now. How can that be? Well, development has certainly slowed. Major software developers don't really exist so much for the Newton any more. Most moved onto the Palm OS or dropped out of sight. However, most of their software stayed and much of it is now freely available. You can outfit a 2100 with most things under the sun for nearly nothing. So from a user investment standpoint, its a very, very affordable platform. Most of the software that is still charged for is under current development, an example? The ATA driver for compact flash RAM cards or the wireless network driver for WaveLAN and compatible cards. These days with the new open source movement gaining more and more a lot of Newton software has taken that route so again its very available and much becomes a comm
unity effort. Here the size of the community becomes a positive, we have like goals so its not so much a bunch of people running in different directions.
Mac OS X provided an interesting challenge to the Newton community. With Mac OS X we could no longer use our tried and true syncing software for address books and calendars unless we chose to use both the syncing software and the organizer software in the Classic environment. Not exactly a choice situation. But that was how things were, until iCal ... Once iCal came out all of a sudden the world changed. Between iCal and Mac OS X's AddressBook there was a huge opportunity for completely native syncing in Mac OS X, plus the fact that the development tools were all freely available. So guess what? One can sync over Ethernet or over Serial with Mac OS X. My calendar on my Newton is the same as one of my calendars in iCal, multiple calendar support is not available yet, mainly because the Newton only supports a single calendar so the question is how to combine and parse calendars while syncing them. AddressBook support, works quite nice, only hang up there is companies don't sync yet, again, something that is st
ill being worked on. What we are really talking about though is how the community became self supporting in terms of technical support, hardware development (yes there is hardware development going on for the Newton), and software development. I am trying to get at the fact that the Newton community became enamored with the Newton as a device, became comfortable with what it could do for them, and then as time went on determined that they could maintain the platform themselves. With people developing ways for current technology to interface with the Newton - why would I move to another platform such as Palm or PocketPC. Not only that, but since the OS design and interface is more capable on the Newton ... plus there is the fact that getting the Newton working with current tech has not been that huge a problem, the Newton was so forward thinking at the time in terms of capabilities that current developers are able to tap what was already available.
The things that keep me on the Newton are simple. I love Apple and its an Apple PDA, I am drawn to the simplicity of its design and the depth of the product to be able to continually do more than I expect rather than run into short comings. Few products are able to keep up with the times. At some point the Newton will fail as a platform, we will run out of spare parts, we will run out of opportunities to expand its capabilities, standards will move so far away from the Newton that we will not be able to interface data with it in a workable fashion. But when will that be? I doubt any time soon. I had thought that BlueTooth and the death of Serial would bring it on. However, I was wrong, Bluetooth development is on the way and Serial is going down slow thus allowing us plenty of time as a community to adjust. The Newton has been dead a long time when one considers all the changes that have occured. That said, it has not been dead long when you compare it to the user base of any platform. How many Mac users wer
e running a version of System 7 when v.9 came out? A lot. How many people are still running Windows 98? A lot.
Basically the average Newton user thinks in their head - loyalty to the platform (the thing just grows on you), vast abilities (it still does all I want from a PDA), room to grow (there is much most of us hardly use yet), screen size (I took my senior year class notes on a MessagePad 120 and later a 2000), and refinement (the Newton MessagePad was built to be a MessagePad the OS is not Windows shrunk to a PDA or an electronic datebook expanded to do more and more like a Palm).
Its hard to cover everything that is available. I am working on getting into the practice of syncing Quicken with my Newton, I can write checks on it, I do my e-mail on it, BlueTooth support is coming, I keep books on it to read in waiting rooms, I can write notes on it and dump them to my desktop then open em in a text editor like Word or AppleWorks or TextEdit. I upload meeting agendas to it so that when I go to a meeting I have my copy of the agenda, right where I can make notes on it, my addresses are there, my calendar is there. When it comes to the Newton, well, basically it is what most people do on their computers except I can take it anywhere I want. Most of the time I write on it, sometimes I draw, and lately I type some ... flexibility ...
Good luck with your paper and I hope I helped some.
-- As Always, David This was sent by a Newton. -- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries List FAQ/Etiquette/Terms: http://www.newtontalk.net/faq.html Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Feb 16 2004 - 21:00:01 PST