[NTLK] A Good read

This copied from Ars today.
Infinite Loop writer Erica Sadun: The not-a-Mac Newton

My favorite Mac wasn't actually a Mac; it was actually the NeXT
cube, the ancestor of OS X. But since we're sticking with Apple
products, I'm going to have to go with the Newton. Which also isn't a
Mac. But at least it was made and distributed by the right company. The
Newton was my first true handheld development love, and will never
fully be displaced in my heart even by a platform as sexy as the
iPhone.

To understand my love for the Newton, you have to look back to the
1980s and to my looseleaf binders filled with Inside Macintosh
material. Thousand-page manuals with Pascal references, all photocopied
and collated, provided a daunting and often anti-intuitive development
environment. The Newton, in contrast, used Dylan. A Lisp-derived
system, Dylan offered an entirely new way to think about Apple
development. It was simple, it was elegant, it was sexy. Offering
objects and database "soups," it was amazingly flexible to work with
and a joy to program.

Unfortunately,
the platform never really took off. It was pushed to market before it
was ready and priced way too high. Yet it was useful enough that today,
hobbyists are still devoted to the platform in its various MessagePad
and eMate incarnations. The 2009 Newton Conference is scheduled for July 31st through August 2nd in Vancouver, Canada.

The Newton's handwriting recognition
in particular got a bad rap despite its real usability. You could take
notes and add pages under real-life conditions. It functioned
effectively (if with real limits) in the boardroom and the classroom.
Within the first few months of its release, you could beam arbitrary
data between units and connect to the Internet. Of course, you had to
buy a 300-baud modem card to stick into your unit, but if you had
access to a land-line and an account, you could dial long distance to
check your e-mail on the go.

Clever touches like auto-detecting circles and squares when drawing
that could then be moved around MacDraw-like on the screen, plus the
scribble-to-erase functionality, brought a layer of elegance on top of
the base technology and wouldn't be out of place on more modern
systems. To say that the Newton was ahead of its time is to say that
water is wet. As Apple failures go, the Newton was one of the best.

====================================================================
The NewtonTalk Mailing List - http://www.newtontalk.net/
The Official Newton FAQ - http://www.splorp.com/newton/faq/
The Newton Glossary - http://www.splorp.com/newton/glossary/
WikiWikiNewt - http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
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Received on Fri Jan 23 20:57:49 2009