[NTLK] Fact Check

[Jon Glass]

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 2:51 AM, Ryan Vetter <physicalconstants at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> Can receive, wirelessly, news services and other data
> -Can receive pages to notify them of voice messages
>
> What is left as very vague during the Newton Getting Started Video (1993) is the bit about sending a fax to Margaret.  "Say you're on a train, or a plane, or at a little cafe, you can write a fax.  Say you want to send that fax to Margaret"... It then shows the Newton formatting a new fax cover sheet... but then it goes onto the next topic.  Say you do want to send that fax to Margaret from the little cafe, or the train?  How would an OMP user have accomplished this?  They leave this unanswered in the video.  The only way I can see wireless faxes happening is via a cell phone tethered to the Newton.  So the cell phone acts as a modem (Apple's PCMCIA fax/modem card could plug into phone with a standard phone cord).  Is that correct?  This is going back to when I was in the beginning of high school, so I was pretty much unaware of all this stuff.
>
> Am I totally off, or is this what Apple really had in mind?  But they just did not have enough time to explain all this in the video, so they left it out, as it is obviously an additional add-on sort of outside the Newton ecosystem (i.e. you must have a cell phone with a data plan).
>
> With the Gotham commercial, it's easy to surmise that the fax from the Motel was sent by plugging the Newton into the phone line in the hotel room, and sending the fax that way (with PCMCIA fax/modem card of course).  I have no idea how anyone would track the expense on that in real time, what faxes would cost from a hotel room... that was a bit before my time.  Any suggestions?
>

It's hard for us to grasp, over 15 years later, that when the Newton
came out, wired communication was not only the norm, but wireless was
outside the realm of anybody but the most wealthy. The only affordable
means of wireless was the pager. The bulk of them were simple
noise-makers, and you would have to call to get the message. Later
text messages became possible and more common. But they were
one-way--at first. I seem to recall "beepers" that could also send
text, but my own mind is fuzzy at this point. ;-)

As to sending those faxes from the train--well, that is a bit of a
non-sequitor. You would write the fax, and put it in your outbox to
send later, when you were plugged in--at least the normal person
would. There were phones that could act as modems via infra-red, but I
shudder to think of the cost of actually sending the data. I remember
doing email here in Krakow in 1999 or 2000, and it practically wiped
out the credit on my phone. ;-) And all I did was send one vital
email. Most people (myself included) simply plugged into a phone line
to do all their communications. BTW, I would travel for months on end
with my Newton alone. I Used Catamount's Aloha software to do my AOL
email, together with my wife. (She used Gesture Mosaic to write, so as
to not mess up my learned HWR settings). I was a member of this list
then, as well as a couple more. My wife was on an active mail group,
so we pumped out the emails. BTW, this was with NOS 1.3. I also sent a
lot of faxes. And yes, we used hotel and motel rooms, as well as homes
we were visiting and church offices where we were visiting. Just a
reminder. Back then, there was also now Web as we know it today. It
wasn't until AOL 2.something before AOL had access (horrible access,
IIRC) to the web, and Compuserve required you to find you own way to
enable ppp access, and your BYOB. I used Netscape 1.1, even though it
crashed constantly.

All that to say that our expectations of today are far beyond what
users then expected. Wireless was rare, and static. "Online" just as
often meant just faxing and email, and cell phones were still the
purview of those who could afford them, and they were rather rare, and
wireless data was the pits. ;-) Remember. The Newton modem worked at
2400bd. GPRS is 54,000, and we call that murderously slow. (my first
modem was a 1200bd modem built into my 80x24 column "CGA" laptop--a
Tandy, with a 10 meg hard drive)

-- 
 -Jon Glass
Krakow, Poland
<jonglass at usa.net>

"I don't believe in philosophies. I believe in fundamentals." --Jack Nicklaus