[NTLK] Blast from the past!

[Matthias Melcher]

You guys know that I loved my Newton. I liked it so much that more than ten years after using it for the last time, I bought several MP2100 and eMate, mostly to understand the inner workings and to get the emulator working on my phone. Both my kids (7, 8) have an eMate and use it.

I bought my original Newton in Los Angeles right after it was released by Apple. I hacked in all my contacts, my appointments, my notes, well, you know - everything. After a short while, I ran out of space and added a 2MB card which from then on received all new entries.

Being a software developer by trade, I soon wanted to write my first apps, only to find out that Apple demanded $1000 for the SDK. I was shocked. Sure, I developed on an SGI at that time, and they charged $600 for a "C" compiler alone, but $1000 for a private person with no way of selling anything I would write - no way. I called Apple for a discount to no avail. Soon after, Palm released their PDAs, and within weeks, some hacked toolchain was available. I never touched my Newton again.


Well, it's June 2012. Between 1994 and now, a few things happened: I moved around the world, started a family, changed careers, and so much more. In preparation of another move, I cleaned out a storage that I had not opened in at least eight years. After digging through many boxes, containing clothes from the 80s (you should see those neck ties!), VW Beetle parts, and first generation answering machines, I spotted something I thought was long lost: my OMP!

I forgot about everything else in that storage and unpacked the OMP in amazement. Like everything else in that humid basement, it had suffered a lot. The plastic case is brittle and white from the environmental stress. The batteries leaked and the acid started to dissolve the lower parts of the case. Nevertheless, what a great surprise! And upon further inspection, I found a perfectly clean 2MB card in the PCMCIA slot. Will it still contain any information?

Whipping out my MP2100, I push the Flash Card in. A message box pops up. Will it ask me to format the card? Nope, it recognizes the card and offers to mount it read-only. I do. And there it all is: my appointments with my boss from January 1994 to discuss the move to California. My contact data to my room mate at the student apartment. The outline of the software is writing at that time. Some really ugly doodles (they would not be any better 18 years later), and more things that were beyond the original capacity.

And while there are a lot of items from the initial database are missing and are probably lost forever in the on-board RAM that should have been buffered by the now leaking batteries, the little glimpse into my past made my morning a great one today.

 - Matthias