Apple Newton

This article is about the Apple Newton platform. For the Apple MessagePad series of hardware devices, see MessagePad.

Newton

Developer	Apple Inc.
Type	Bar PDA
Release date	1993 (1993)
Input	Touch screen

The Apple Newton MessagePad 2100, running Newton OS, alongside an iPhone running iOS, Apple's current handheld platform.

The Newton platform was an early personal digital assistant and the first tablet platform developed by Apple, the second platform being iOS, used in the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. 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. Most Newton devices were based on the ARM 610 RISC processor and all featured handwriting recognition software. Most Newton devices were developed and marketed by Apple (this includes the whole MessagePad line and the eMate 300), but other companies — Motorola, Sharp, and Digital Ocean — also released devices that ran the Newton OS.

Three Newton MessagePad devices with keyboard and LinearFlash PCMCIA memory card accessories.

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" was coined relatively late in the development cycle by Apple's CEO John Sculley, the driving force behind the project. Larry Tesler identified that a powerful, low-power processor was needed for sophisticated graphics manipulation. He found Hermann Hauser, with the Acorn RISC Machine processor, and put together Advanced RISC Machines. 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 cases for the design was known as the "Architect Scenario", in which Newton's designers imagined a residential architect 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 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 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 variant that still retains some interest. Although it was efficient (for its day, and considering its substantial run-time dynamism), 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), Dylan was relegated to experimental status in the "Bauhaus Project" and eventually canceled outright. Its replacement, NewtonScript, 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 contemporary application programming. The Newton project fell victim to project slippage, scope creep, 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 PDAs had been developing since the original Psion Organiser 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.

Product details

Hardware models

• MessagePad 100 (also known as the H1000, OMP or Original MessagePad)
• MessagePad 110
• MessagePad 120
• MessagePad 130
• eMate 300
• MessagePad 2000
• MessagePad 2100

• 
  MP100
• 
  eMate 300
• 
  MP2000

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 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, 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) 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.

Notes

The Notes application allowed users to create small documents that could contain text that had been typed, or that had been recognized from handwriting, as well as free-hand sketches, "Shapes", and "ink text".

Photograph of screen displaying Checklist, some bullet points checked and/or "collapsed"

In version 2.0 of the Newton OS, the Notes application (as well as Names) could accept what Apple termed "stationery", 3rd-party created plug-in modules that could extend the functionality of the basic applications.

One of the new types of Notes stationery added to Newton OS 2.0 was a hierarchical, bullet-ed, collapsible, multi-line "Checklist", an implementation of outliner software. This could be used for organizing thoughts, priorities, "to do" lists, planning steps and sub-tasks, etc. Each bullet point could contain as many lines of text as desired. A bullet point could be dragged and placed underneath another bullet point, thus forming a hierarchical outline/tree. When a bullet point was dragged, the entire sub-tree of child bullet points underneath it (if any) would be dragged along as well. If a bullet point had child bullet points, tapping the hollow parent bullet point once would "roll up" or collapse all the children ("windowshade" effect). The parent bullet point would become a solid black circle and all the children would disappear. Tapping the parent bullet point again would make the children re-appear. Because this functionality arrived in Newton OS 2.0, several third parties made similar software before for OS 1.x Newton machines, the most notable of which was Dyno Notepad, released in 1993.

Names

The Names application was used for storing contacts. Contacts created either on the Newton device or on a Windows or Macintosh desktop PIM 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 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 could be synchronized to each other.

Operating system and programming environment

The Newton OS consists of three layers. At the lowest level, a microkernel handles resources like tasks and memory. On top of the microkernel, the bulk of the operating system is implemented in C++, including the communications layer, handwriting recognition, and the NewtonScript environment. The top layer consists of built-in and user installed applications written in NewtonScript.

NewtonScript is an advanced object-oriented programming 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 computers, and later a Microsoft Windows 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. 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, 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 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
• Linux
• Microsoft Windows

In the Media

The MessagePad featured in an August 1993 installment of Garry Trudeau's popular political cartoon Doonesbury, 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 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 features the Newton during the episode Lisa on Ice, where school bully Dolph makes a memo on the device to "Beat up Martin", 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 was fired by the board and Steve Jobs took over as then interim CEO. Two ex-Apple Newton developers founded Pixo, the company that created the operating system for the original iPod.

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 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", 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 name was later used for Apple's PowerPC 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, Nokia 770 and N800, Microsoft Windows, the PepperPad 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-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.

External links

Newton technical documents for programmers

NewtonScript Programming: NewtonScript is the native programming language for all MessagePads

• The Newton Application Architecture
• Newton Tool Kit (NTK) Integrated Development Environment Manual
• The Newton Application Architecture
• A quick introduction to programming in NewtonScript using NTK
• The NewtonScript Programming Language (Apple Manual).
• Newton Programmer's Guide, OS 2.0
• Newton Programmer's Guide, OS 2.1 Addendum
• Newton Programmer's Reference, OS 2.0
• Newton OS 2.1 Engineering Documents
• Explanation of NewtonScript Prototyping
• Newton User Interface Specification Guide

General historical information on pen computing

• Notes on the (relatively unknown) History of Pen-based Computing
• Annotated Bibliography in Pen Computing