[NTLK] Everything we need.... we still have!!

[Noah Leon]

>I have just realized, that in the case of the Newton, we actually have even more: whatever we need to fix about everything!!!
>(It would be great to do things, while we still do have it all).

I think there was a lot of talk like this just before the iPhone came out. Einstein was getting pretty good, and Paul Guyot had the idea of “relativity” which would be to merge the Newton OS with the underlying host OS, Linux, Unix, or whatever, so that data could be shared. I still think this is a valid approach. 

Besides being sidelined by the iPhone for a bit, one of the challenges seems to be that we don’t have access to the Newton source, and even if we did, to use it on new hardware legally, you still need to have a legally procured MessagePad ROM (you have to own a 2.1 Newton). 

My question is this: If we were to legally get our hands on the Newton OS source code, all of it, could we complete this task started by Paul with “Relativity”? Newton OS would then run unbelievably fast, natively, on the ARM-based devices we all have, and we (not me, since I am not a coder) could write software to do secure browsing, email, etc. Is anyone here capable of writing these things and turning the Newton OS into an open source project if we were to finally get the source from Apple? I’m thinking of Matthias, but is there anyone else with the ability to do these things?

If so, it might be worth having one more push to get them to release the source, like I believe they did for the Lisa.

noah