[NTLK] iPhone is not the new Newton (& announcing a Newt sell-off shortly)

[Jon Glass]

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 9:11 AM, Forrest Buffenmyer <anasazi4st at me.com> wrote:
> Those of us that love the Newton will likely continue to do so as long as each of ours functions...or something better comes along. With HWR and a few other things, the iPad could have been that "something better" we've been waiting for.
>
Some of us still love our Newtons, but can no longer use them for
much, due to the fact of changing needs, and/or hardware limitations
and problems. (In my case, my batteries are dead, and my needs are
different). But that doesn't change the fact that I still love the
Newton, and will never get rid of them. My main Newton, in fact, sits
behind me on a shelf on wall power 24/7, just in case I need it for
reference, or for reading one of my few ebooks (I have the entire LOTR
and some of the HG2TG books, as well as all the Sherlock Holmes and
some other, random books on it). But mostly, I like to fire it up, and
reminisce. My Palms (a Tungsten and a Treo 650) and now my iPhone
handle the daily lifting, and my iPhone has even reduced my wonderful
MacBook Nano (MSI Wind running a Hackintosh OSX) to desktop duty. I
never expected that.

I also love this community here on NTLK. A couple times, I've dropped
off the list for a few weeks or even months, but I always came back.
Sometimes, (like the question re: NCU/NCK yesterday) I can be of minor
help, but mostly, I just like to follow on, and add my own memories to
the noise/conversation. ;-) So, as long as there is an NTLK, I will be
on it. That has been my decision. But honestly, I can't depend on my
Newtons for daily use. I think I mentioned the other day, that my
daughters still use their for a few games, writing and drawing, so
they probably use theirs more than I use mine. ;-) (Kind of odd,
considering they have DSs, and I forget what else)

I'll just add my voice the the flogging of this horse. It would be
well to remember that the Newton was on life-support before Jobs came
back. Only it wasn't obvious until later. The internals of the OS are
a mess (-16010 error anyone?) and there was nobody with the will or
ability to fix it before Steve even threatened it. All Steve did was
remove its life support. And saying that, I say it from one who was
around at the time, and who was _furious_ with Apple for dumping
it--but I was as mad at _how_ Apple went about it, leaving tons of
developers and customers hanging, as much as I was with the actual
doing. There used to be an interview up somewhere, of one of the
engineers who left about the time Jobs came back. His story of the
internals of the NewtonOS are nightmare material. Basically, his view
was that the OS required a complete rewrite to make it move forward in
time. The world had changed, and the OS was not only incapable of
dealing with these new things (TCP/IP, SSH, color, etc.) but that it
(NOS 2.1) was so hacked-together with band-aid solutions that it was a
wonder it worked at all. I saved that article on my hard drive, but it
was one of a few files that weren't backed up, and were lost in a hard
drive crash (ok, so about a year of man-hours of work was also lost,
but that paled in comparison to this article, IMO)

So, there's my flog on the poor beast.

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

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