#Newtonians drivers#
#Newtonians android#
#Newtonians software#

Izaac,' a sly nod to the old Apple handheld, and you'll find the moniker in his email handle.

#Newtonians software#

In 2007, when Lewis Miller turned up at a software developer meetup centered around the brand new iPhone, he brought his Newton.

#Newtonians android#

'An Android sent this,' reads the signature on an email from Ron Parker. Yes, newer devices have eclipsed the Newton in so many technical ways. It spans not just the handhelds themselves, but also accessories, software, manuals, and boxes. A few years ago, he bought 'The Newton Museum' from another collector, and today, he proudly displays it on the web. Outside of Grant Hutchinson's massive Newton collection, the most notable stash belongs to former Apple man Walter Smith. Lloyd Conway says that prices are going up, a clear indication that supply is shrinking. But if eBay is any indication, their numbers are dwindling, probably because their hardware is wearing out. Photo: Courtesy Grant Hutchinson The Newton MuseumĪccording to Steve Capps, Apple sold about half a million Newtons, and at least a few hundred are still out there - on desks next to PCs, plugged into network routers, strapped onto bicycles, advertised on eBay. 'One of the reason I chose it is that I knew I could get support.' I started looking at different options, and I settled on the Newton,' he says. 'My wife asked me to get a PDA because I had so much stuff going on. Lloyd Conway bought his first Newton in 2008 - 10 years after the line was discontinued - and he treats the NewtonTalk mailing list as a support line. Yes, people still use the thing as a PDA.

#Newtonians drivers#

They need hand-holding.' He'll even ship them memory cards they can slot into their Newtons and instantly grab all the software and drivers they need. They want to fix 'em so they can use 'em, and they want to get wireless on them so they can communicate. Guyot has also spoken at The Worldwide Newton Conference, and through the NewtonTalk mailing list, Parker helps people solve their own puzzles, providing advice on repairing, augmenting, and, yes, jury-rigging the Newton. 'I do things other people would have trouble doing.'īut while Parker, Guyot, and others hack the Newton for their own enjoyment, they also share their creations - and their knowledge - with others. The Newton is a puzzle that needs solving.

'Apple had now mastered writing recognition in a big way.'įor Ron Parker - the man with The Lake Tahoe Hiking Newton - hacks like this are worthwhile simply because they're difficult. ' understood medical Latin written by someone who never learned to write with any style,' he says. Though the handwriting recognition was laughable with the first handhelds that arrived at the hospital, he says, a later version of the device, the MessagePad 2100, was quite different. In the '90s, Andrei Chichak, of Edmonton, Canada, worked at a university hospital that used the Newton for administrative tasks. And by the time the device was discontinued in 1998, many people say, it was remarkably adept at reading your scribble. 'I thought it was kind of amazing that it was able to do anything like that at all,' Hutchinson says. But it worked up to a point - even with words written in cursive. Yes, the handwriting recognition was flawed. 'There was nothing else you could compare it to, unless you were living in the MIT Media Lab.' You could draw a rough circle and it would snap into a perfect geometric example of a circle,' he says. 'You could draw a rough box, and it would snap into a perfect square. He loved that it could recognize not only handwriting, but shapes.

'There was a inherent visual attraction to it.'

Very much like early Macintosh software,' he says. Hutchinson was a graphics man, and when he first picked up the Newton, he was most impressed by the software interface that provided a window into Apple's device. >'There was nothing else you could compare it to, unless you were living in the MIT Media Lab.'įor people like Hutchinson, the Newton was - and still is - a remarkable feat of engineering. 'I used it for years before I ever owned a laptop.' 'It was my everyday note-taking, address book, and calendaring device,' he says. Through the late '90s, he carried it with him everywhere. It wasn't until 1996, after Apple released a later incarnation of the device, the MessagePad 120, that Hutchinson bought his own - at a discounted price. There was something fundamentally fascinating about the whole thing.' It was so different from anything else I had ever used,' Hutchinson remembers. I was just enamored by the way it did things. 'We would work the floor at the show during the day, and in the evenings, he let me play with it.