
Mikel Evins about the Lisp-based Newton OS. - prakash
http://lispm.dyndns.org/news?ID=NEWS-2004-08-14-1
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st3fan
I worked with some people on a Newton project. This was way before the product
was officially released. I was 17 or so and exposed to this crazy highly
dynamic programming environment. Unlike anything we youngsters had worked with
before.

If I remember correctly we got two kinds of development hardware from Apple.
One was a fat Quadra ('040) with an ARM NuBUS card and the MCL development
environment. It got us started with code although there was no device to run
this on.

Later on we got a Newton prototype. Real hardware. It was very bare. Basically
a PCB with the LCD/touch display on top of it and connected to another Quadra
with a flat ribbon cable. I remember we could run the real NewtonOS on that.
The prototype was called the 'Bunwarmer' I think.

The Newton was awesome. Too bad it was killed.

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Hexstream
My personal highlight:

" _It had a novel event-handling system capable of supporting arbitrary user-
defined events. The event system identified events by pattern-matching.

Q: What kind of high-level events would that be? Could the user define those?

Mikel: Yes. The idea was that you could plug a sequence of lower-level events
together and use a property sheet to perhaps parameterize them, thus creating
a novel kind of event. Sort of like constructing AppleScripts by recording UI
actions, but in smaller, easier to understand and easier to debug pieces. (One
of the things I wrote for the automated testing system was an application that
watched what the user did and constructed a representation of the observed
actions that could be replayed on another system; it represented actions not
in terms of low-level MacOS events, but in terms of abstract state transitions
described in terms of frames that represented application features, so that
moving to a different machine with different screen layout and so forth would
not break the playback. Some of the ideas for the event system came from
combining that experience with the experience of Jim Grandy, who actually
wrote the event system, and who had earlier worked on Garnet.)_"

The future of OSes, folks!... and of applications too I'd say. It's surprising
how "advanced" techniques can be very helpful even in "simple and common"
cases, I've been thinking lately.

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bkudria
This a really cool design. Is there anything approaching it today?

~~~
evgen
Sadly, no. The Newton was the last of the lisp machines really. The coolest
thing about Newton app development was that the prototype based environment
and soup data stores made it very easy to "monkeypatch" existing applications
to add new features or change functionality. Apps ended up being very small
but still quite powerful. You had a system that the application-level
equivalent of browser-based userscripts (a la Greasemonkey) and javascript-
powered web site mashups.

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andreyf
I wonder if there were (m)any Lisp hackers on the iPhone team...

