On Jun 13, 2009, at 1:34 AM, James Fraser wrote:
> --- On Sat, 6/13/09, Steven Scotten <splicer@paroxysm.com> wrote:
>
>> Isn't that a little like saying that Lewis and Clark
>> weren't pioneers because Columbus got to America centuries earlier?
>
> That's a disingenuous comparison because L and C are not credited
> with discovering America: merely with discovering more *about* it.
And Apple didn't invent the category of "devices that make use of
electricity," nor did Apple invent the computer. Apple didn't even
invent the portable computer. Or the computer that you could hold in
your hand (was the Sinclair the first PDA? Hmmm...)
You wrote that the Newton was "groundbreaking" and almost in the same
breath claimed that Apple doesn't get "honor" for that.
Nothing ever invented (unless you go back far beyond recorded history)
didn't in some way rely on prior art. So there's always someone saying
that no, the Sex Pistols weren't the real original punk rockers, it
was actually the Ramones. Then someone else says, no, it was the
Stooges, then someone says, "well, that rebellious attitude really
came from Elvis's early days" and next thing you know (and yes,
someone I was speaking to said this with an absolutely straight face)
Mozart was really the true original punk rocker.
It's a meaningless game of shuffling labels. The fact that all
progress is in some way incremental and doesn't take away from the
actual progress that was made.
George Cayley invented the fixed-wing aircraft and built the first
glider that could carry a human, but the Wright Brothers actually
built something that flew on its own power. Cayley had already built
everything except for the motor and propeller... and someone else
invented the motor, so those Wright Brothers didn't really invent
anything, did they?
Well, actually they did. They invented the airplane. It doesn't matter
how many parts of it were already invented, it doesn't matter that
Professor Langley built a flying machine a decade and a half before
the Wrights did; Langley's crashed and the Wrights' airplane didn't.
AT&T and Apple were both working on their products for years before
either was released. Computing in general had been racing towards
miniaturization for almost the entire history of computing. That AT&T
released theirs first in no way means that Apple stole their idea.
It's entirely possible that AT&T stole the idea from Apple and just
got to market faster. It's even more likely that each "invented" their
devices independently, because dozens of companies and thousands of
inventors were working on the same problems all at once. AT&T released
something that, for whatever reason, sank to the bottom of the Potomac
before it left the ground on its own power. Then the Newton came out.
...and in fact, Newton can be said to have sunk to the bottom of the
Potomac as well. For all its virtues, Newton failed to provide the
public at large with a device that was suitable to the larger-scope
task: a device that would do much of what Newton did, not as well or
as elegantly but was pocketable. I know those of us that had the
Newton when the Palm was but a twinkle in its mother's eye love to
sneer at the PalmPilot, but they really made something that could be
carried unobtrusively and could be used as an ubiquitous capture
device for ideas and contact information. The Newton had much more
elegant software and greater capabilities, but Palm (or US Robotics or
whoever it was) really invented the PDA in a form that worked for
gazillions of people.
No matter how many times in 1997 I compared my MP130 with my
colleagues' PalmPilots and got on my soapbox about how the Pilot was
too small to get any real work done on and how the operating system
was too rudimentary to even be called an OS, and how I could do all
these wonderful things with my Newton, they always looked at me and
said, "yeah, you're right about all that, but what I had before was
this," and they would hold up a pencil and a 3"x5" spiral notepad,
"and you want me to start carrying *that* around?"*
I'm playing Devils Advocate to some degree here, but looking back
without the lenses of the enthusiasm I had in the 90s for the Newton,
I have to admit that I don't use my MP2100 any more, for any reason.
When I use Newton I use my eMate. As much as I still love to talk
about the Newton as the thing that started it all, it was never a PDA
for me. It was the coolest laptop ever.
(and yes, I'm still screaming bloody murder that my iPhone isn't the
coolest laptop ever:
http://splicer.com/2009/06/02/handheld-computing-one-step-forward-two-steps-back
)
It seems likely that the "true" inventor of the Personal Digital
Assistant probably hasn't yet graduated from kindergarten.
Steve
*sample conversation is a semifictional amalgamation of several much
longer-winded discussions
====================================================================
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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/
====================================================================
Received on Sat Jun 13 05:47:49 2009
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