Filed under: Portables, Apple, Apple History
The 10th anniversary of the Newton's death
It was ten years ago today, February 27, 1998, that the Apple Newton was officially killed. During the five years that the Newt was in production it garnered nearly as many detractors as admirers, was the butt of jokes and set the ground work for Palm, Handspring and the like.There's still an active community of Newton users out there, and they've made some incredible accomplishments in those ten years, like:
It beat the Windows UMPC in CNet's head-to-head battle, and there's even been a successful port of the Newton OS to other handheld devices. The Newt is gone, but not really. Long live the green PDA!
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Snaggy said 12:13PM on 2-27-2008
Egg freckles forever! :-)
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Mike said 12:16PM on 2-27-2008
If only the iPhone would incorporate the Newt's Assistant function. That would be an unstoppable combination.
Sigh...
PS. still pissed at Jobsie for not allowing us to buy the spun off company.
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Ryan said 12:40PM on 2-27-2008
Newton toting AOL users might appreciate this trivia question from the Monday night "Nuthin' but Newton" chat archives:
Over the years, the Newton line of devices was produced in how many colors? (hint: black and greenish-black count as the same color for this question). Extra credit if you name them.
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Mike said 1:12PM on 2-27-2008
Tough question Ryan,
I know there was also a transparent model but aside from that I can't recall any other colors beside the black and dark green.
Cheers!
ZeroCorpse said 2:58PM on 2-27-2008
Well, I know there was a lovely transparent green/blue (teal?) one, called the e-Mate. I had one. Nifty gadget, if only it had a way to interface with a modern Mac easily.
Otherwise, I thought the MessagePads were only ever in black.
KR said 1:33PM on 2-27-2008
Eat up Martha.
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MiraN said 1:41PM on 2-27-2008
I still miss mine. It had me completely spoiled. My Newton could read my handwriting (better than my mom). I've tried palm devices, which suck, and always get returned or sold off. I haven't yet decided to get an iPhone, but we'll see after the official 3rd party apps are released if it will measure up.
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Ishimaru said 2:42PM on 2-27-2008
ROFL:
http://www.mirrors.ausmac.net/ftp/Quicktime-Movies/misc/the-simpsons-newton.mov
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Mike said 5:02PM on 2-27-2008
Yes, yes. It is very funny but not even close to the truth with regards to the 2X00 series.
BTW, I had text to speech in 1997 on my 2100. Ten years later PDAs (and smartphones for that matter) still can't get it right.
BillB said 9:46PM on 2-27-2008
There was a special "White" newt made for the pope!
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Ryan said 8:20PM on 2-28-2008
Circle gets the square!
Black/greenish black... limited edition clear sent to developers... and white (MP110s, I believe) for his holiness.
owlgarden said 8:11AM on 2-28-2008
Anyone want to help port Einstein to the XO?
I'll have to dig up my newton files from 10 years ago
(on a scsi disk somewhere)
contact me owl(at) owlgarden.net
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Morgan Aldridge said 2:57PM on 2-28-2008
@owlgarden You'll see fairly poor performance of Einstein on the XO as it's not on an ARM architecture.
While the current version of Einstein is a number of times slower than a MessagePad 2x00 on ARM-based hardware (like some of the Zaurus, Nokia, or PepperPad devices), but emulating the ARM processor as well requires quite a beefy processor and I'm not sure how well the XO would do at present.
Morgan Aldridge said 2:31PM on 2-28-2008
I've added a short addendum to yesterday's "10 Years Ago Today", mostly hardware hacker additions:
makkintosshu.dyndns.org/journal/state-of-the-newton-addendum
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