Newton (platform) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Newton platform was an early personal digital assistant

Personal digital assistant

A personal digital assistant , also known as a palmtop computer, or personal data assistant, is a mobile device that functions as a personal information manager. Current PDAs often have the ability to connect to the Internet...

and the first tablet platform

Platform (computing)

A computing platform includes some sort of hardware architecture and a software framework , where the combination allows software, particularly application software, to run...

developed by Apple, the second platform being iOS, used in the iPhone

IPhone

The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...

, iPod Touch

IPod Touch

The iPod Touch is a portable media player, personal digital assistant, handheld game console, and Wi-Fi mobile device designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The iPod Touch adds the multi-touch graphical user interface to the iPod line...

and iPad

IPad

The iPad is a line of tablet computers designed, developed and marketed by Apple Inc., primarily as a platform for audio-visual media including books, periodicals, movies, music, games, and web content. The iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010 by Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs. Its size and...

. Development of the Newton platform started in 1987 and officially ended on February 27, 1998. Some electronic engineering and the manufacture of Apple's Newton devices was done by Motorola

Motorola

Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, which was eventually divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions on January 4, 2011, after losing $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009...

. Most Newton devices were based on the ARM

ARM architecture

ARM is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by ARM Holdings. It was named the Advanced RISC Machine, and before that, the Acorn RISC Machine. The ARM architecture is the most widely used 32-bit ISA in numbers produced...

610 RISC processor and all featured handwriting recognition

Handwriting recognition

Handwriting recognition is the ability of a computer to receive and interpret intelligible handwritten input from sources such as paper documents, photographs, touch-screens and other devices. The image of the written text may be sensed "off line" from a piece of paper by optical scanning or...

software. Most Newton devices were developed and marketed by Apple (this includes the whole MessagePad line and the eMate 300

EMate 300

The eMate 300 was a personal digital assistant designed, manufactured and sold by Apple to the education market as a low-cost laptop running the Newton operating system...

), but other companies — Motorola

Motorola

, Sharp, and Digital Ocean — also released devices that ran the Newton OS

Newton OS

Newton OS was the operating system for the Apple Newton PDAs produced by Apple from 1993-1997. Newton OS was written entirely in C++ and trimmed to be low power consuming and use the available memory efficiently...

Development

The Newton project was a PDA platform. The PDA category did not exist for most of Newton's genesis, and the phrase "personal digital assistant

Personal digital assistant

" was coined relatively late in the development cycle by Apple's CEO John Sculley

John Sculley

John Sculley is an American businessman. Sculley was vice-president and president of PepsiCo , until he became CEO of Apple on April 8, 1983, a position he held until leaving in 1993...

, the driving force behind the project. Newton was intended to be a complete reinvention of personal computing. For most of its design lifecycle Newton had a large-format screen, more internal memory, and an object-oriented graphics kernel. One of the original motivating use case

Use case

In software engineering and systems engineering, a use case is a description of steps or actions between a user and a software system which leads the user towards something useful...

s for the design was known as the "Architect Scenario", in which Newton's designers imagined a residential architect

Architect

An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and oversight of the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to offer or render services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the...

working quickly with a client to sketch, clean up, and interactively modify a simple two-dimensional home plan.

There is, however, an extensive history of pen computing

Pen computing

Pen computing refers to a computer user-interface using a pen and tablet, rather than devices such as a keyboard, joysticks or a mouse....

that predates the Newton, though not generally in the form factor of what would now be called a PDA.

For a portion of the Newton's development cycle (roughly the middle third), the project's intended programming language was Dylan

Dylan programming language

Dylan is a multi-paradigm programming language that includes support for functional and object-oriented programming, and is dynamic and reflective while providing a programming model designed to support efficient machine code generation, including fine-grained control over dynamic and static...

though in fact the language and environment never matured enough for any applications to be successfully written. Dylan was a small, efficient object-oriented Lisp

Lisp programming language

Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized syntax. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today; only Fortran is older...

variant that still retains some interest. Although it was efficient (for its day, and considering its substantial run-time dynamism

Dynamic programming language

Dynamic programming language is a term used broadly in computer science to describe a class of high-level programming languages that execute at runtime many common behaviors that other languages might perform during compilation, if at all...

), Dylan never lived up to its developers' performance expectations and was a tough sell for a development team unaccustomed to Lisp programming. When the move was made to a smaller form factor (designed by Jonathan Ive

Jonathan Ive

Jonathan "Jony" Ive, CBE is an English designer and the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple Inc. He is the leading designer and conceptual mind behind the iMac, titanium and aluminum PowerBook G4, G4 Cube, MacBook, unibody MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPod, iPhone, and iPad.- Early...

), Dylan was relegated to experimental status in the "Bauhaus Project" and eventually canceled outright. Its replacement, NewtonScript

NewtonScript

NewtonScript is a prototype based programming language created to write programs for the Newton platform. It is heavily influenced by the Self computer language, but modified to be more suited to needs of mobile and embedded devices.- History :...

, had garbage collection and tight integration with the "soup" storage and user-interface toolkit, and was specifically designed to run in small RAM/large ROM environments. It was mostly developed by Walter Smith from 1992 to 1993.

The project missed its original goals to reinvent personal computing, and then to rewrite

Rewrite (programming)

A rewrite in computer programming is the act or result of re-implementing a large portion of existing functionality without re-use of its source code. When the rewrite is not using existing code at all, it is common to speak of a rewrite from scratch...

contemporary application programming. The Newton project fell victim to project slippage, scope creep

Scope creep

Scope Creep in project management refers to uncontrolled changes or continuous growth in a project's scope. This phenomenon can occur when the scope of a project is not properly defined, documented, or controlled...

, and a growing fear that it would interfere with Macintosh sales. It was reinvented as a PDA platform which would be a complementary Macintosh peripheral instead of a stand-alone computer which might compete with the Macintosh.

Although PDA

PDA

A PDA is most commonly a Personal digital assistant, also known as a Personal data assistant, a mobile electronic device.PDA may also refer to:In science, medicine and technology:...

s had been developing since the original Psion Organiser

Psion Organiser

The Psion Organiser was the brand name of a range of pocket computer developed by the British company Psion in the 1980s. The Organiser I and Organiser II had a characteristic hard plastic sliding cover protecting a 6x6 keyboard with letters arranged alphabetically.Early Psions are very robust...

in 1984, the Newton has left one particular lasting impression: the term personal digital assistant was first coined to refer to the Newton.

John Sculley says Apple invested approximately US$100M to develop Newton.

Hardware models

MessagePad 100 (also known as the H1000, OMP or Original MessagePad)
MessagePad 110
MessagePad 120
MessagePad 130
eMate 300
EMate 300
The eMate 300 was a personal digital assistant designed, manufactured and sold by Apple to the education market as a low-cost laptop running the Newton operating system...
MessagePad 2000
MessagePad 2100

Application software

Most Newton devices were pre-loaded with a variety of software to help in personal data organization and management. This included such applications as Notes, Names, and Dates, as well as a variety of productivity tools such as a calculator, conversion calculators (metric conversions, currency conversions, etc), time-zone maps, etc. In later/2.x versions of the Newton OS

Newton OS

these applications were refined, and new ones were added, such as the Works word processor and the Newton Internet Enabler, as well as the inclusion of bundled 3rd party applications, such as the QuickFigure Works spreadsheet (a "lite" version of Pelicanware's QuickFigure Pro), Pocket Quicken

Quicken

Quicken is a personal finance management tool developed by Intuit, Inc.Quicken runs on Windows and Macintosh systems. Previous versions ran on DOS. An online version is also available. The last version of Quicken for Macintosh computers was Quicken Essentials for Mac released in February 2010...

, the NetHopper web browser, and the EnRoute email client. Various Newton applications had full import/export capabilities with popular desktop office suite and PIM (Personal Information Manager)

Personal information manager

A personal information manager is a type of application software that functions as a personal organizer. The acronym PIM is now, more commonly, used in reference to Personal information management as a field of study...

application file formats, primarily by making use of Apple's bundled Newton Connection Utilities and also the Newton Connection Kit, which was sold separately and only worked for Newton devices that used the 1.x versions of the Newton OS.

Names

The Names application was used for storing contacts. Contacts created either on the Newton device or on a Windows or Macintosh desktop PIM

Personal information manager

could be synchronized to each other. Entering a date in Names for fields such as birthday or anniversary automatically created corresponding repeating events in the Dates application. Each contact had an attached free-form notes field available to it, that could contain any mix of interleaved text, ink text, Shapes, or Sketches. Like Notes, Names could be extended by developers, to create special new categories of contacts with specialized pre-defined fields. Names shipped with 3 types of contacts, "people", "companies", and "groups", but a developer could define new types, for instance "client", "patient", etc. Stand Alone Software, Inc. also created a Newton software package called the Stationery Construction Kit, which allowed users to make stationery themselves without aid of any other tools.

Dates

Dates supplied calendar, events, meeting, and alarms functions, including an integrated "to do" list

Time management

Time management is the act or process of exercising conscious control over the amount of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase efficiency or productivity. Time management may be aided by a range of skills, tools, and techniques used to manage time when accomplishing specific...

manager. It offered many different display and navigation styles, including a list view, graphical day "time blocking" view, or a week, month, or year grid. As with Names and Notes, Dates items created either on the Newton or on a Windows or Macintosh desktop PIM

Personal information manager

could be synchronized to each other.

Operating system and programming environment

The Newton OS

Newton OS

consists of three layers. At the lowest level, a microkernel

Microkernel

In computer science, a microkernel is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system . These mechanisms include low-level address space management, thread management, and inter-process communication...

handles resources like tasks

Task (computers)

A task is an execution path through address space. In other words, a set of program instructions that are loaded in memory. The address registers have been loaded with the initial address of the program. At the next clock cycle, the CPU will start execution, in accord with the program. The sense is...

and memory. On top of the microkernel, the bulk of the operating system is implemented in C++

C++

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

, including the communications layer, handwriting recognition, and the NewtonScript

NewtonScript

environment. The top layer consists of built-in and user installed applications written in NewtonScript.

NewtonScript is an advanced object-oriented programming

Object-oriented programming

Object-oriented programming is a programming paradigm using "objects" – data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions – to design applications and computer programs. Programming techniques may include features such as data abstraction,...

language, developed by Apple employee Walter Smith. Some programmers complained at the $1000 cost of the Toolbox programming environment. Additionally, it required learning a new way of programming.

The Newton Toolkit (NTK), an integrated environment tailored to the graphical nature of the Newton platform, was developed specifically for developing applications for the Newton platform and included a graphical view editor, a template browser, and an interactive inspector window for debugging. Initially, it was only available for Macintosh

Macintosh

The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...

computers, and later a Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

version was developed. The Technical Lead for the Newton Toolkit was Norberto Menendez; other engineers on the team were Ben Sharpe and Peter Potrebic.

Data storage

Data in Newton is stored in object-oriented databases known as soups

Soup (Apple Newton)

Soup is the file system for the Apple Newton platform, based on a shallow database system. The Newton considers its internal storage, and each inserted card, as a separate "store"...

. One of the innovative aspects of Newton is that soups are available to all programs; and programs can operate cross-soup; meaning that the calendar can refer to names in the address book; a note in the notepad can be converted to an appointment, and so forth; and the soups can be programmer-extended—a new address book enhancement can be built on the data from the existing address book. The soup system also made it easy to synchronize data, and the Newton Connection tools could be used for importing and exporting data. Among many file formats are the Rich Text Format

Rich Text Format

The Rich Text Format is a proprietary document file format with published specification developed by Microsoft Corporation since 1987 for Microsoft products and for cross-platform document interchange....

, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Works, and many more.

Another consequence of the data-object soup is that objects can extend built-in applications such as the address book so seamlessly that Newton users can sometimes not distinguish which program or add-on object is responsible for the various features on their own system, because the advanced nature of Newton devices makes it easy to accept such add-ons. A user rebuilding their system after extended usage might find themselves unable to manually restore their system to the same functionality because some long-forgotten downloaded extension was missing. Data owned and used by applications and extensions themselves is tossed in the "Storage" area of the "Extras" drawer in 2.x Newton devices; on 1.x systems, they can only be found or removed in the Memory section of the built-in Prefs application, in the Card slip (also built-in), or with third-party tools such as NewtCase. There is no built-in distinction between types of data in that area. For example, an installed application's icon could be sitting right next to a database of addresses used by another installed extension further down the list.

Finally, the data soup concept works well for data like addresses, which benefit from being shared cross-functionally, but it works poorly for discrete data sets like files and documents. Later, the 2.0 release of the Newton OS

Newton OS

introduced Virtual Binary Objects to alleviate the problem of handling large data objects.

Package installation, capacity planning, and disaster recovery

Several software utilities which accommodate data transfer to and from a host system exist for the following platforms:

Mac OS
Mac OS X
UNIX
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

In the Media

The Messagepad featured in an August 1993 instalment of Garry Trudeau

Garry Trudeau

Garretson Beekman "Garry" Trudeau is an American cartoonist, best known for the Doonesbury comic strip.-Background and education:...

's popular political cartoon Doonesbury

Doonesbury

Doonesbury is a comic strip by American cartoonist Garry Trudeau, that chronicles the adventures and lives of an array of characters of various ages, professions, and backgrounds, from the President of the United States to the title character, Michael Doonesbury, who has progressed from a college...

, where its handwriting recognition was mocked. The final panel of the strip showed the Newton producing the text "egg freckles" in response to input. This phrase was subsequently included as a trigger for an easter egg

Easter egg (media)

Image:Carl Oswald Rostosky - Zwei Kaninchen und ein Igel 1861.jpg|250px|thumb|right|Example of Easter egg hidden within imagerect 467 383 539 434 desc none...

in later editions of the Messagepad, producing a panel from the strip when it was entered on the device. Apple subsequently donated a Messagepad to Trudeau.

The Simpsons

The Simpsons

The Simpsons is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical parody of a middle class American lifestyle epitomized by its family of the same name, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie...

features the Newton during the episode Lisa on Ice

Lisa on Ice

"Lisa on Ice" is the eighth television episode of The Simpsons sixth season. It was first broadcast on Fox in the United States on November 13, 1994. In the episode, Principal Skinner hands out academic alerts to the Springfield Elementary students, and Lisa discovers that she is in peril of...

, where school bully Dolph makes a memo on the device to "Beat up Martin

Martin Prince

Martin Prince, Jr. is a recurring character in the Fox animated series, The Simpsons, and is voiced by Russi Taylor. Martin is Bart Simpson's classmate, and is Lisa Simpson's rival in intelligence, as well as Nelson Muntz's favorite target for bullying...

", which the handwriting recognition software mistranslates to "Eat Up Martha".

Newton technology after cancellation

Before the Newton project was canceled, it was "spun off" into an Apple wholly owned subsidiary company, Newton Inc., but was reabsorbed several months later when Apple CEO Gil Amelio

Gil Amelio

Gilbert Frank Amelio is an American technology executive. He grew up in Miami, Florida and received a bachelor's degree, master's degree, and Ph.D. in physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology...

was fired by the board and Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs

Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc...

took over as then interim CEO. Two ex-Apple Newton developers founded Pixo

Pixo

Pixo was a company that developed infrastructure for hand-held devices. It was founded in 1994 when Paul Mercer, a software developer at Apple, left to form his own company. The company developed a system software toolkit in C++ for use on cell phones and other hand-held devices...

, the company that created the operating system for the original iPod

IPod

iPod is a line of portable media players created and marketed by Apple Inc. The product line-up currently consists of the hard drive-based iPod Classic, the touchscreen iPod Touch, the compact iPod Nano, and the ultra-compact iPod Shuffle...

.

Speculation continued for several years that Apple might release a new PDA with some Newton technology or collaborate with Palm. Feeding a bit of speculation, Apple put the "Print Recognizer" part of the Newton 2.1 handwriting recognition system into Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

version 10.2 (known as "Jaguar"). It can be used with graphics tablets to seamlessly input handwritten printed text anywhere there was an insertion point on the screen. This technology, known as "Inkwell

Inkwell (Macintosh)

Inkwell, or simply Ink, is the name of the handwriting recognition technology developed by Apple Inc. and built into the Mac OS X operating system. Introduced in an update to Mac OS X v10.2 "Jaguar", Inkwell can translate English, French, and German writing...

", appears in the System Preferences whenever a tablet input device is plugged in. An Easter egg in Print Recognizer on the Newton (write "ROSETTA! ROSETTA! ROSETTA!", and the Newton will insert "ROSETTA! ROSETTA! Hey, that's me!" instead) was present in Inkwell in Mac OS 10.2 and 10.3, but seems to have been removed in 10.4. Larry Yaeger was the author of the original Rosetta recognizer on the Newton, and was also responsible for porting it to Mac OS X. The Rosetta

Rosetta (software)

Rosetta was a lightweight and dynamic binary translator for Mac OS X which Apple released in 2006 when it transitioned the Macintosh from PowerPC to Intel processors. It allowed pre-existing software to run on the new systems without modification....

name was later used for Apple's PowerPC

PowerPC

PowerPC is a RISC architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM...

software translation layer for Intel-based Macs.

Some of the handwriting recognition technology from the Newton later found its way into Windows CE. The letter preferences menus showing the different ways that people write cursive characters were pixel identical on Windows CE to those previously used on the MessagePad.

At an All Things Digital conference in 2004, Steve Jobs made reference to a new "Apple PDA" (perhaps a successor to the Newton) which the company had developed but had decided not to bring to market. The tablet eventually evolved into the iOS product family.

Newton emulation

Since 2004, the Einstein Project has been working on emulating the Newton for use as an alternate OS on other platforms. It is currently available for the Sharp Zaurus, Apple's Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

, Nokia 770 and N800

Nokia N800

The Nokia N800 Internet tablet is a wireless Internet appliance from Nokia, originally announced at the Las Vegas CES 2007 Summit in January 2007. N800 allows the user to browse the Internet and communicate using Wi-Fi networks or with mobile phone via Bluetooth. The N800 was developed as the...

, Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

, the PepperPad

Pepper Pad

The Pepper Pad is a Linux-based mobile computer with Internet capability and doubles as a handheld game console. It also serves as a portable multimedia device...

3. The emulator is an open source project, but requires an original Newton ROM to be installed in order to function. Since September 2010, Einstein also runs on iPhones, iPads, and the Android operating system since March 2011.

Future

A possible Newton revival was at one time a common source of speculation among the Macintosh user base; when patents for a tablet based Macintosh were applied for, rumor sites jumped at the possibility of a new tablet PC

Tablet computer

A tablet computer, or simply tablet, is a complete mobile computer, larger than a mobile phone or personal digital assistant, integrated into a flat touch screen and primarily operated by touching the screen...

-style Macintosh.

In September 2009, Michael Tchao, one of the Newton's marketing product champions, returned to Apple.

Development

Programs have been written for the Newton since its cancellation. New functions include: reading ebooks, reading RSS feeds, and writing spreadsheets.

Newton technical documents for programmers

NewtonScript Programming: NewtonScript

NewtonScript

is the native programming language for all MessagePads

General historical information on pen computing

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.