
Newton Storage History (2007) - jsnell
http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=948
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kabdib
Another one, more technical, on the patching technology we used in the Newton:
[http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=2233](http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=2233)

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protomyth
I loved the whole Newton Soup system. It's a real shame that something like it
didn't get further developed. I always wondered what it would look like scaled
up into a cluster arrangement.

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kabdib
One of the guys who designed soups (Walter Smith) went to Microsoft and worked
on the database-based storage system for Longhorn. It didn't go that well; my
take is that the project got really big and politicized -- classic Microsoft
-- and he wound up leaving after a while.

I think that systems like ReThinkDB are really close, if not superior. One
thing the Newt never had to worry about was concurrency; the scripting
environment was single-threaded, and the storage system only ever had one
transaction at a time (with some advanced cheating going on for background
storage operations and garbage collection). Modern systems solve harder
problems, albeit with many orders of magnitude more resources and way better
tools.

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wrs
It should have had, but never got, "contexts" so when your code is changing an
object in one place, your other code doesn't see the changes unless you want
it to. Ah well, people seem to have made it work anyway. :)

CouchDB is _pretty_ close in principle but does a lot more stuff. For
something closer to the original, I think you could do it PostgreSQL quite
easily. But then you need a language layer...I think ECMAScript proxies might
work. Hmm, I guess somebody should make an npm module!

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kencausey
This is slightly off-topic but has anyone blogged about Palm history as
wonderfully as kabdib/Dadhacker/Landon has about Newton and other topics?

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marktangotango
Seems like Steve Yegge worked on palm, I haven't read anything from him at
this level though, I am not an authority though!

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kencausey
A good enough excuse to troll through his blog posts again at least. ;)

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__d
The great thing about Soups/Stores was the sharing: applications could augment
the frames with their own data, and everything worked together cooperatively
with ubiquitous access to the information.

In the modern era of sandboxing, this is impossible, and services don't
compose nearly so well.

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georgeecollins
The Soup was cool and really ahead of its time. But then I also think that the
Newton was slow and a battery hog compared to say a PalmPilot, partly because
one had a fancy innovative OS and the other was relatively simple.

