In working on my Book III (basically, the early 90s), I've done a ton of research on handheld devices and the money pit they were. Newton is not going to be any more than a footnote.
Jerry Kaplan's book Startup tells the story about how Sculley stabbed GO in the back with Newton -- actually, both GO and General Magic. They got a lot of press and flopped miserably. And of course, let's not forget Momenta (as easy as that would be, given that they failed so fast).
Meantime, Palm finally figured out something people would buy and use, by scaling back expectations and building a device that did something valuable.
Two of the most important differences in design assumptions between Newton and Palm, from my POV on the Newton team:
1. Newton was designed with “natural” pen-based interactions as a core design goal. That had huge effects on the entire product from the OS to the UX, including the need to recognize normal writing. The Palm Pilot was designed as a fairly standard PDA OS with the keyboard replaced by an oddly modified set of character shapes that had to be learned by users before they could enter text. We thought that would be a deal-breaker for potential Palm users — we were wrong!
2. Newton was designed as a standalone system, the next generation of computing after desktops. The assumption was that it could be your only computer. Syncing to a PC/Mac was an afterthought. Palm was designed as an adjunct device for a PC, so its capabilities were far less and the sync functionality was core to the system.
There are lots of other differences but many can be traced back to those two. For example, the huge difference in the tech specs and therefore the cost of the devices is directly related to both of those assumptions.
Number 2 was the big stickler for me - and it was frustrating that Apple didn't get this when the original Mac had AppleTalk built in from day 1! If only Hypercard had better networking support and a server - we'd be surfing stacks instead of the web.
You're right. Other failures back then were also trying to do that.
Unfortunately, it wasn't generally accepted that those two goals were not achievable. That's engineering for you: figuring out what's actually possible.
There was a little sticker you could put on the back of your Palm Pilot that reminded you of the Graffiti language. As you said, it was not a deal-breaker.
Startup is a really good book. People should be very wary of power of monopolies, MSFT also really messed with GO and General Magic.
The example of Palm vs Newton is great because it shows how clear goals trump excellent technology. Newton had this amazing OS where you could turn it on or off at any moment and preserve state. All data was available to all apps. And with that technology -- and probably some other choices-- and a great processor at the time (relative to Palm) it was useless because it was so slow. A handheld device cannot ever be slow. Palm did very little well and survived up until smart phones.
And Palm's "Graffiti" actually existed as a software package for the Newton by Palm before the Palm Pilot! It was popular in the early days of the Newton because the handwriting recognition in the first versions of the Newton OS were pretty bad (Remember Doonesbury's "Egg Freckles" comic, or The Simpsons' "Eat up Martha" when the bullies were trying to write "Beat up Martin"?)
There is another really good book that's sadly out of print: Piloting Palm by Andrea Butter & David Pogue (yes, that David Pogue, from the Nature PBS shows).
tip: don't pay the $80 for a new one. I got a used one for $8, and it came within 3-4 days.
Precisely for a guy who bought the Newton to USA and found it impossible to use in a Gartner conference which gave palm a free trial. You returned it and credit card not charged. I still have that Newton in storage but run thru many palm and typing (with treo phone) thousand words email back to others. All good.
I had an eMate and it was (and still is - if you replace the battery pack) an exceptional device for taking notes and focused distraction free writing.
What makes it great for these tasks is that it wakes from sleep instantly and puts you right back where you were in your document as fast as you can open it. Saving is automatic. You just open it up, type some stuff, and close it again. It's light, rugged, and the battery lasts all day.
What's not great anymore is that it's non-trivial to transfer your writings to a modern system. However, it is still possible.
Looking through the list of 3rd party implementations, I came across the Digital Ocean devices (not the cloud provider; the original company was defunct by the late 1990s) - the Newton came out just a few years before I really started getting into tech (I was a poor high school kid at the time), so not terribly familiar with a lot of companies in that space. I do remember seeing the Newton being used in the Steven Seagal movie, Under Siege 2, which came out in 1995.
Yes. I wrote the web server for it back in 1998. It was actually pretty cool since we also integrated a public "wall", calendar and contacts sharing, instant messaging, and even a federated discovery protocol for other Newton servers.
The F in FAQ isn’t to be taken at face value: […] text consisting of questions and their answers may thus be called a FAQ regardless of whether the questions are actually frequently asked. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAQ]
Similar to Doom, there is a group of people who try to get web servers running on unconventional hardware. There is an HTTP server for the Nintendo 3DS for example: https://github.com/dimaguy/3ds-httpd
I doubt that any question related to the Apple Newton would be frequently asked! Assuming that Apple Newton is what it is about, the FAQ doesn't seem to explain.
Is it really a good FAQ if it doesn't explain _what_ it is as top level info? What is this?
There are no links to the original product (or whatever it is - hardware? Software? OS?) either in the first few minutes of navigation.
Has the Apple Newton really fallen so far out of the public consciousness that this wouldn't be obvious? What about the Palm Pilot? Yes, I know the idea of PDAs has basically disappeared since the advent of smartphones (which are really just PDAs that also work as phones), but even so.
I know what an Apple Newton is. But this is not the Apple Newton FAQ. It's the Newton FAQ.
If you don't specify the context and namespace, don't be surprised when people don't know wtf you're talking about. You might as well make a "String Class FAQ"
Or better yet a "String FAQ" for maximally reduced context, similar to a "Newton FAQ". Just the addition of an extra word (Apple) would help, but presumably the Newton fans are still tied to the way the Apple marketing talked about Newton without any qualification words.
> Has the Apple Newton really fallen so far out of the public consciousness that this wouldn't be obvious?
Yes.
> What about the Palm Pilot?
The what?
Kidding aside, I doubt anyone who finds their way to this FAQ without knowing what it's about will care enough to find out. If they do, there's no shortage of obvious search terms throughout the text that will make the context very easy to come by.
Although if you just spent 20 minutes training it, it was frighteningly good at recognizing handwriting. It could read my writing better than I could back in the day.
Jerry Kaplan's book Startup tells the story about how Sculley stabbed GO in the back with Newton -- actually, both GO and General Magic. They got a lot of press and flopped miserably. And of course, let's not forget Momenta (as easy as that would be, given that they failed so fast).
Meantime, Palm finally figured out something people would buy and use, by scaling back expectations and building a device that did something valuable.