The 10th anniversary of the Newton's death
Posted Feb 27th 2008 12:00PM by Dave Caolo
Filed under: Portables, Apple, Apple History
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!
Tags: apple history, AppleHistory, newton
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
2-27-2008 @ 12:13PM
Snaggy said...
Egg freckles forever! :-)
Reply
2-27-2008 @ 12:16PM
Mike said...
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.
Reply
2-27-2008 @ 12:40PM
Ryan said...
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.
Reply
2-27-2008 @ 1:12PM
Mike said...
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!
2-27-2008 @ 2:58PM
ZeroCorpse said...
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.
2-27-2008 @ 1:33PM
KR said...
Eat up Martha.
Reply
2-27-2008 @ 1:41PM
MiraN said...
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.
Reply
2-27-2008 @ 2:42PM
Ishimaru said...
ROFL:
http://www.mirrors.ausmac.net/ftp/Quicktime-Movies/misc/the-simpsons-newton.mov
Reply
2-27-2008 @ 5:02PM
Mike said...
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.
2-27-2008 @ 9:46PM
BillB said...
There was a special "White" newt made for the pope!
Reply
2-28-2008 @ 8:20PM
Ryan said...
Circle gets the square!
Black/greenish black... limited edition clear sent to developers... and white (MP110s, I believe) for his holiness.
2-28-2008 @ 8:11AM
owlgarden said...
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
Reply
2-28-2008 @ 2:57PM
Morgan Aldridge said...
@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.
2-28-2008 @ 2:31PM
Morgan Aldridge said...
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
Reply