Apple Newton

An early HandHeld PersonalDigitalAssistant that pre-dated PalmPilot but had many devoted users. Monochrome and fairly big, only dial-up networking in those days but had handwriting recognition that was sophisticated even by today's standards. Was discontinued in the late 1990s.

Programmed in NewtonScript, a dialect of SelfLanguage. Once you learned the object framework, it was a joy to hack on. One could decompile the bytecode of any app with ViewFrame?, even those in ROM, and get a fully indented symbolic listing. This made it possible for me to write some glue to play a chess program for it called Deep Green on the internet chess servers. Mmmm.... geeky! -- IanOsgood

An underground development community has come up with useful items such as PcCard? Ethernet and WiFi drivers.

There are still yearly World-Wide Newton Conferences. In 2006, they introduced an emulator for the Newton hardware that allows running the Newton Os on Linux based handhelds like the Zaurus or Nokia 770.

• http://wwnc.newtontalk.net/
• http://www.tow.com/2006/01/14/wwnc-2006/
• http://www.kallisys.com/newton/einstein/en

Did you know you can run a web server on your Newton? Here is a dynamically served screenshot from such a server (note the familial resemblance with the current MacOsx dock.)

• http://ndutyme.dyndns.org:8088/screen/

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CategoryHandheld