The Newton The World Forgot

Three centuries apart

Summer 1666. An apple fell on Newton. And set him off thinking. Of gravity. And of the three laws of motion.

May 29, 1992. Apple announced a Newton. And set the world off writing. And drawing. With a stylus.

It was the Newton MessagePad, of course. That CEO John Sculley unveiled that day.

During his keynote address. At the Chicago Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

Latest toy in town

Apple fans and the media were on cloud nine. As Sculley flaunted the cool prototype he'd brought along.

And as he took the covers off Newton's surreal technology platform.

And its design concepts. Even though it was early days.

Newton was portable. But it wasn't a laptop. It didn't even have a physical keyboard!

It was a handheld device. But it wasn't a smartphone.

And there were no tablets back then.

Yet it was Apple's most cutting-edge gadget. Until that time.

Sculley had coined a term for it. Personal digital assistant (PDA).

He promised "nothing less than a revolution".

Bells and whistles

You could jot ideas down on Newton's notepad. File them away in folders.

Crunch numbers with its calculator. Convert currencies.

Maintain your appointments in its calendar. Daily. Weekly. Monthly.

Organise your contacts in its address book. Which Newton would intuitively link with the calendar.

Tick off your "to do" list. Prioritise tasks.

Exchange calling cards with a business associate. Via its infrared port.

Answer emails. And send faxes. Via an optional external modem.

Send messages to someone's pager. Via an optional Newton Messaging Card.

Sync Newton's data with your Mac or Windows PC. Import and export files. Via an optional Newton Connection Kit.

The wow factor

What stole the show, though, was the flat plastic stylus. Stashed away in Newton's side holster.

You could write or scrawl with it. On the screen. After all, there was no keyboard.

Newton's software was smart enough. To read your writing.

Whether in cursive. Or in block letters.

Whether in capitals. Or in lower case.

And transform it into typed text. On the fly.

You could even doodle rough shapes by hand. In free form.

Newton would translate your artistic sketches into symmetrical figures.

Which you could drag around. Or edit.

Or even make them vanish in a puff of smoke. By crossing them out in a zigzag pattern.

All with the nifty stylus!

In tech jargon, this magic was "pen-based mobile computing". At its best.

Playing to the gallery

Steve Capps, from Newton’s original design team, came on next.

And showed off how you could order a pizza. Using icons on Newton's screen.

By dragging your choice of "toppings". And dropping them onto a "pie". And then sending out a fax.

Ahead of its time

Newton would run its own operating system. Newton OS. Written in C++.

Its Intelligent Assistant would predict your intent. From the context. And suggest default actions.

For example, Newton would process your NewtonMail. Even as you read it.

It would hyperlink all "to:" and "cc:" names. To the address book. On its own.

Scan the email subject and body text. For any mention of dates or times.

And ask. Whether to schedule a calendar event. Even setting up a reminder for you.

You could write "Interview with Colin Fri afternoon". In natural English. And tap "Help".

Newton would draft a calendar entry. With Friday's date. A tentative afternoon slot.

And the latest Colin from your contacts. As a meeting invitee.

You could scribble "Call Stan". And Newton would look up the address book. And dial Stan's phone number for you.

It also had its own coding language. NewtonScript. Based on which third-party programmers could create apps.

Which they could "beam" onto Newton through its infrared port. Without even having to "instal" the apps. They would run right away.

For the record, this was before WiFi came along in 1997. And Bluetooth in 1999.

All this was the stuff of dreams. The reporters went over the top. With their hoopla.

Apple engineers started putting in 15 to 20 hours a day. To deliver their project. In production mode.

They had raised the bar! Consumers now expected the moon.

D-day

Aug 3, 1993. Apple launched Newton MessagePad officially. With a USD 699 price tag.

At Macworld Expo. In Boston's Symphony Auditorium.

Cabs sported ads on their roofs. "Newton MessagePad. Now taking orders." As they ferried visitors from the airport to the venue.

Displays stood at the hall entrance. Each had an actual Newton inside.

But ran demo software. The commercial version wasn't ready yet. :(

Apple had assembled 4000 of these display units.

For retail outlets across the US to put them up. On their checkout counters.

And for Macworld attendees to touch and feel. Many got to try them out hands on.

The organisers handed them blue badges at the exit. "I saw it. I did it. I want it."

Inside the hall, Apple's promo video ran. "Newton is coming! Newton is coming!"

Vital stats

Newton was 7.25 x 4.5 x 0.75 inches in size. Small enough to fit into Sculley's jacket pocket.

And weighed 0.9 pound.

It had a 20 MHz ARM 610 processor. Which British chipmaker ARM had developed for Newton exclusively.

After all, Apple had invested USD 3 million. For a 43% stake in ARM.

640 KB memory.

4.5 x 3.5 inch LCD display. 240 x 336 pixel resolution. Black and white. No backlighting.

Powered by an AC adapter. Or by four AAA batteries. Lasting 14 hours on average.

You could even keep an optional rechargeable battery pack. As standby.

Newton came with a fabric case. For protection.

A "getting started" software pack. On 3.5-inch floppy disks.

Rubberised skin. To keep it from slipping out of your grasp.

And an intro VHS tape.

Killer feature turns deal-breaker?

Apple's pre-launch campaign had bragged about Newton's handwriting recognition. Very loudly.

Turns out, that's what backfired. In an ugly way.

It didn't work out of the box. Rather, it was adaptive.

Newton's Handwriting Instructor came with a free game. For you to "train" it. On your writing style.

It would get more accurate with practice. But even after weeks, it would fail to identify many words.

Newton shipped with a 10,000-word built-in dictionary. You could try adding your own manually. But it wouldn't always accept them.

It was hard for Apple to explain their way out of this one!

Critics had a field day. Calling the premature debut a "beta test in public".

Anticlimax

Now the media took turns spoofing Newton.

Aug 1993. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau made sport of it. With a seven-day series of comic strips. "The Pen is Mightier than the Keyboard".

In which title character Mike Doonesbury tried his luck. At getting Newton to decipher his handwriting.

With laughable outcomes. Examples:

Mike: "I am writing a test sentence". Newton: "Siam fighting atomic sentry".

Mike (again): "I am writing a test sentence". Newton: "Ian is riding a taste sensation".

Jokes and parodies did the rounds too.

Question: How many Newtons does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: hwrihdtfb.

Even so, Apple sold 50,000 Newton MessagePads by end Nov 1993.

Nov 13, 1994. The Simpsons released Episode 8 of Season 6. "Lisa On Ice".

In which Kearney asked Dolph to take a memo on his Newton. Dolph wrote, "Beat Up Martin".

Which Newton interpreted as "Eat Up Martha".

Upon which Kearney grabbed Dolph's Newton and flung it at Martin.

Putting things right

Seven?successive hardware iterations followed the original MessagePad.

Mar 4, 1994. MessagePad 100. USD 499. And MessagePad 110. With 1 MB memory. USD 599.

Jan 30, 1995. MessagePad 120. With 2 MB memory. USD 599.

Mar 14, 1996. MessagePad 130. With backlighting. 2.5 MB memory. USD 799.

Mar 7, 1997. eMate 300. A landscape model. In a clamshell case. The only Newton with its own physical keyboard.

320 x 480 pixel screen. 3 MB memory. Special design for teachers and students. USD 799.

Mar 24, 1997. MessagePad 2000. With a 162 MHz CPU. 5 MB memory. It could make out 16 shades of grey.

It was also a multimedia device now. Displayed images. Played audio files through its internal speaker. USD 799.

Oct 20, 1997. MessagePad 2100. Last in the family. With 8 MB memory. USD 999.

Its operating system, too, went through five free patches and upgrades.

Oct 30, 1993. Newton OS 1.1 and 1.2.

Mar 4, 1994. Newton OS 1.3. With letter-by-letter recognition.

Mar 14, 1996. Newton OS 2.0. A major rewrite. With far better character and symbol recognition.

You could pick pre-set shortcuts. Which would automatically expand. Into complete words or phrases.

The notepad got new stationery. Like "checklist" and "outline".

Mar 21, 1997. Newton OS 2.1. With a spell checker. You could also resize photos.

Record sounds. And toggle the screen. Between landscape and portrait modes.

None of which mattered in the end.

The world ain't fair

History never gave Newton a second chance.

The original MessagePad's negative coverage haunted every follow-on edition. None of them garnered any market share. Worth writing home about.

In all, only about 200,000 Newtons were ever sold. Below par by Apple standards.

RIP Newton

Feb 27, 1998. Steve Jobs, who'd returned to Apple the previous year, called off the Newton project. For ever.

Yet Newton lives on

Newton had come a cropper in its six-year lifetime. But it inspired many later industry breakthroughs.

2001. Newton's "puff of smoke" came back from the dead. In MacOS X 10.0. Where dragging an icon off its Dock produced a "poof" animation.

2002. Newton's finally perfected handwriting recognition took rebirth as Inkwell. In MacOS Jaguar update.

2007. Amazon introduced Kindle. For you to read ebooks. Which you could do on the original Newton.

2008. Apple launched its App Store. Emulating Newton's ecosystem of third-party developers.

Who, back then, had added useful shareware. Word processors. Spreadsheets. Email. Invoicing. Validated forms. Games. And much more.

2011. Apple released Siri. A descendant of Newton Intelligent Assistant.

2013. Newton's real-time clock icon returned. As a live widget in iOS 7.

2020. Newton's deleting data with a zigzag line showed up again. In iPadOS 14's Scribble.

One of Newton's third-party apps was Graffiti. For simplified yet flawless handwriting recognition.

The developer that had published it was Palm. Who went on to hit the big time. With their own PDAs. Remember PalmPilots?

Apple had given ARM its first break. By contracting with them to produce every single Newton processor.

ARM today has a USD 89.6 billion market cap. And powers most smartphones and tablets in the world.

Newton was Apple's most ambitious failure.

As well as Apple's most immortal success.

Please feel free to leave a comment. Would love hearing from you!

Until next time! Take care of yourself. :)

#Apple #Newton #MessagePad #PDA #Tech