Newton Won't Die

Superman writes "Wired just published an article about the continuing popularity of the Apple Newton MessagePad, with props to Mad Max (a Newton MP3 Player), the new ATA driver, and Newton's 802.11 capabilities. Definitely an interesting read, and more proof that just because technology may be a little bit older, doesn't mean it's not useful." I still have my MP2000, and still think it has the best UI around. I keep meaning to convert it into a wireless MP3 player. I am currently hoping for Apple to make an iPod with AirPort and Rendezvous, though.

Inkwell

Good technology never dies I guess. I wonder if Apple is planning to fill the space left by the Newton. They can't be developing Inkwell [apple.com] for nothing can they?

Re:Inkwell

I like to imagine that the Inkwell technology isn't going to be filled by a handheld portable, but by a smaller kind of laptop. Microsoft has its fantasy for the Tablet PC, but I think Apple's going for it first. Inkwell is smart, it recognizes handwriting instead of Graffiti, it can tell the difference between writing and mousing. Apple now has all it needs to take the keyboards off the iBook and sell it as a tablet-sized iPad.

Filling the Newton's void would be futile; Palm's got it filled neatly and PocketPC fills the rest of it. Apple makes money by filling voids that don't have any clear winner; think of the iPod, without a doubt the most usable MP3 player for the past year. They'd do well by selling an easy-to-use, student-targetted, MacOS-powered tablet computer before Microsoft can get the hardware out there.

Re:Inkwell

I think that your wrong in saying that revising the Newton would be a futile attempt at filling a void that other companies have since occoupied. Apple doesn't fill voids; they create elegant and useable solutions for markets where others have hacked together crap products. Look at the iPod- was it the first MP3 player? No. Was it the first HD based MP3 player? No. Was the MP3 player market a void before Apple came along? No. Has the iPod been a raving success? Yes.

In many ways, I think the current handheld market is the same. Palm passes off the fact that their handhelds are using 10 year old technologies as 'Elegance' while the Pocket PC features typical Microsoft bloat. In the end, I am personally not satasfied with either of these products because I don't think they are the epitome of what a handheld could be.

Let's all face it, what people want out of a handheld computer is relatively simple- it is an extension of the desktop computer. Palm has got this much right. The problem with a Palm however is that the desktop experience has changed from where it was in 1995- people listen to music with their desktop, they play videos, they talk in IMs, surf the web and get email. Palm simply hasn't got the horsepower to keep up.

Apple, on the other hand, does. Between OS X, Apple's core technologies and the iApps, they have the resources and technologies to truly extend the modern desktop computing experience to the mobile market. The two technology barriers that do exist for Apple (handheld hardware and wireless connectivity) can easily be acquired from other companies (with whom Apple currently has relationships- StrongARM, Motorola, Erricson and Nokia).

Imagine an elegantly designed handheld computer running a stripped down version of OS X. At home, it uses AirPort and Bluetooth to run as a LAN mobile extension of your desktop machine, letting you view video from your desktop or play MP3s away from your office.

On the road, an always on cellular modem talks to your desktop computer over a secured broadband connection. Mail that arrives in your Mail.app is now with you wherever you go. You can view and update your iCal calender or Address book from anywhere (and those iCal changes can be updated on the web at your .mac personal web site for all to see). Need to grab a file in your Home directory to give to someone? You just grab it of of your desktop and Bluetooth/IR/802.11B it to someone else.

Need to make a call? Your handheld could act as a wireless IP phone extention to your home telephone and answering machine (with your desktop Mac's modem plugged into the POTS line at home). No more having to hand out a mobile+home telephone number to someone or check two voice mail boxes. Need to reboot that home machine? No problem, open up Terminal.app and go for it.

I would buy such a device in a heartbeat and I think a lot of other people would too. I wouldn't think an Apple handheld like the one above would fill a void; it would show people what a mobile computer could really do.

Newton dead?

I beg to differ:

http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathema ti cians/Newton.html

Looks like a decent unit...

...and I bet Apple knows *exactly* how many colors it displays. 2?

Despite my attempts to kill him...

Apple: Though I fell off of that tree just as hard as I could, I could not overcome 32 feet per second squared. Thus, Newton would not, and could not die.

I regret this, my brothers, and hope that one day if enough of us fall on his head, we may kill him yet. If it comes to it, we may even coerce an entire branch to snuff him out!

Yours,
The Apple

Newton or Pad comp?

As big and heavy as the Newton is (compared to a Palm or iPaq or Zarus), and as small and light as PC laptops are becoming, whats the difference between the two other than the former being obsolescent and the latter being more flexible in terms of hardware vendors (c.f. latest Apple jackboot of non-apple DVD players and its software).

The weight and size of the Newton is a factor. Or did I mistake the slant of the article, and this is more of a nostalgia item, like rehabbing my old Amiga?

Re:Newton or Pad comp?

No, Intel never bought ARM [arm.com], they are still around and still own the rights to the ARM IA. However, the StrongARM CPU was not actually designed by ARM, but rather DEC, who licensed the instruction set from ARM. Actually, if memory serves, DEC designed the StrongARM somewhat at the impetus of Apple at the time the Newton was being developed. A few years later, DEC sued Intel over something completely unrelated: Intel had stolen part of the Alpha design and implemented it in their own chip. Intel basically conceded this, and they reached a settlement part of which included Intel buying much of DEC's semiconductor business, including the 2114x Tulip ethernet chipset, and the StrongARM. Intel basically ignored the StrongARM for a while during which time it became rather popular in embedded devices, and now they have renamed newer versions the "XScale" and started actually marketing them. Probably Intel would love to drop the chip and stop paying royalties to ARM, but their clients would just buy other ARM processors from other manufacturers, and they would not benefit at all.

Re:Newton or Pad comp?

The Newton is more than simply nostalgia. Even today, it is still very useful and still has more power than most PDAs people are using now a days with a 162 MHz StrongARM processor.

I personally always *liked* the size of the Newton. Sure, it wouldn't hurt if it were lighter, but I am the kind of person that likes to get a lot of use out of a PDA device- not just use it to keep track of appointments. I took all of my college lecture notes on my Newton, read a lot of ebooks/websites, IRCd, read/wrote email, even wrote full-blown Newton OS applications on the device itself.

Then I switched to WinCE so I dedicate more time to developing and testing my PDA OS/environment [swiki.net], which aims to be Newton OS replacement for me. It's hard to get everything working as smooth as it did on the Newton. I'd much rather go back to my Newton, and I regret switching. :(

In use at the Javits Convention Center

At the last LinuxWorld Expo in New York, I noticed that every booth had a newton with a card reader attached to it, so they could swipe guests' badges and get a record of who visited their table. They must have had 100s of newtons.

Just another toy

Early models were bulky, expensive and bug-ridden. Apple marketed the Newton poorly, and it was widely ridiculed; a memorable Doonesbury strip by Gary Trudeau effectively doomed the device.
-------------------
If a comic strip could "doom" something, then MS/Windows would be dead a long time ago. It seems that slashdot alone has a large amount of these linked from user comments.

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After shopping around, he found a machine that did it all: Web, e-mail, calendar and address book, but it could also recognize ordinary, cursive handwriting that wasn't as awkward as graffiti The biggest problem with a Newton is its size: It's as big as a brick. ----------- I had a nice little acer laptop that did all of that and more. It had a 233Mhz MMX processor. It ran windows 2000 decently on 80MB (max) of RAM, and was wonderful for Linux. Unfortunately it took a spike in a power surge, silly me for not getting a surge guard

Seems to me that one could do a lot better by getting a used mini-laptop. Mine didn't cost me a huge amount, and it was a lot more productive than any handheld.

It seems that handhelds are often just used as toys, with a cheap notebook at least you can run linux or do some programming

Re:Just another toy

Seems to me that one could do a lot better by getting a used mini-laptop. Mine didn't cost me a huge amount, and it was a lot more productive than any handheld.

Depends on what you want. I have an eMate, which is a Newton that's shaped like a laptop. I've charged it up, taken it with me to a 3-day conference, and used it to take notes at the conference for the full 3 days without ever having to charge it. I took it on a business trip to Europe, and didn't have to worry about getting an AC converter because I didn't have to plug it in the entire time I was there. Can you do that with your used mini-laptop?

Display upgrades

You don't have to listen to your wireless MP3's on a Newton with a dim, old, scratched-up screen - a pal of mine has put together a display upgrade kit [adago.net] and is currently taking orders!

(sorry buddy!)

"Newton Won't Die"

I thought it was oddly appropriate that this story was posted at 4:04pm ;).

I'm not trolling

but seriously, if there is "news" that is remotely Apple related, Wired, is all over it. They love to report Apple news and culture, it tends to be of this type: Gee, Apple stopped doing X long ago, but look, these hip trendy, user groups are doing it themselves!!!! Yay Apple!

Don't believe me? Try this story [wired.com] or this story [wired.com] or this story [wired.com]

Or maybe I'm just missing something? Is there really a well dresses, over educated, hip Apple underground that I have never seen? Wired just tends to report these user groups and people as trendy, San Fran artist types. They have swallowed more than just a bite of Apple's marketing message. (bad pun, I know)

Kind of like Slashdot reports on Linux types... Think about it, it is easy to come up with stereotypes of Wired readers. And slashdot readers for that matter.

but I digress, I do think the Newtons are cool.

Connect to a PC

This sounds cool, but can you connect it to a PC? I don't have money for a Newton and a Mac.

Any chance of someone else building them?

Now that Apple has stopped development, is there any shot that they'd license them to be built by someone else?

Which begs the question, who'd be interested in building it?

I just don't understand....

I just don't understand how/why Apple has yet to create a new PDA. I am 90% sure they will though.

Why?

• A PDA needs a good os, good applications AND a good physical shape much more than a PC. Apple is hands-down the best at this. (For a PC, expandability is often very important. Apple isn't so hot at this IMO.)
  
• .Mac and the digital hub are crying out for way to TAKE your information with you. How awkward did Palms V5 look in the demonstration unvailing .Mac
  
• A PDA is (was) a new platform and doesn't (didn't anyway) need the existing software so much. It was a level playing field that Apple had a natural gift at competing on.
  
• It's F**ing hardware. I thought you ran a hardware company Jobs! ;-)
  

Frankly I can't come up with a many good reasons not to.

• The market already has fantastic products is highly competitive. Palm might have been, but it looks aging. Win CE? It's microsoft on try 3 and the market is still Palms. There is room here
  
• Afraid of a second failure
  
• Waiting for the next BIG thing. Bluetooth? Cheaper color screens? G5s...

Ok so everyone else here probably just made this list, but it was fun speculating! ;-)

Thanks for moding me redundant! It was a pleasure

Two words...

John Sculley. It's no secret that a) Steve Jobs has a tremendous vindictive streak, and b) most of the changes SJ made at Apple immeditaely upon his return were to cut or scale back JS's initiatives.

Yes, Newton was ahead of its time. It was too big. It was too expensive. It was poorly marketing. It was too __________ (fill in the blank). And, the Newton division was always in the red. That is, it was in the red until right before SJ axed it. Yes, friends, Newton was making a profit for the first time when SJ lowered the boom (two consecutive quarters, I believe); that more than anything tells me that killing it was an act of vindictiveness.

Of course, it didn't take SJ long to realize the error of his ways. About a year later, it came out that Jobs was offering to buy out Palm, but considering that Palm was mostly comprised of ex-Newtonites who were forced out by Steve (successful ones at that), there was no way it was gonna happen.

What was really crazy was that Palm was wildly successful at the time, but they were only nailing the low-end of the emerging PDA market. Newton was perfectly positioned at the time to nail the mid- to high-end of the market, particularly in vertical applications. I remember a MacWeek article at the time about how the Newton was causing a stir in several vertical markets. Apple had the first mover advantage, and they virtually owned the higher-margin high-end of the market. Killing the Newton was an act of sheer stupidity and short-sightedness.

Now that Microsoft has entered the market, I would say that the odds of Apple owning a big chunk of the PDA market are virtually nil. Palm has saturated the low and mid-range of the market; Microsoft and their partners are going after the mid to high-end. Once again, Apple set the table and Microsoft is eating the meal.

Apple might have an opportunity to add PDA features to the iPod; however, that still only gives them a small slice of the low-end consumer market.

If Jobs had been wise, he would have spun out the Newton division, much as he did the Filemaker Pro division, to create its own brand identity apart from Apple and keep the focus on cross-platform compatibility. Perhaps he might have more shrewdly licensed out the Newton OS and allowed PC manufacturers to build the hardware and sell the systems, thus getting a significant jump on Microsoft.

Ah well.

Manditory Simpson's Quote

Nelson: Take a note on my Newton to beat up Martin.
Kearny: (scribles "Beat up Martin" on Newton's display
Newton: (converts handwriting to "Eat up Martha")
Nelson: (grabs Newton and hurls it at Martin's head)

Undead PDAs?

Newton Won't Die

Sir Isaac Newton, interviewed at his London home, had this to say, shortly before eating the reporter:

"Brrraaaiinnssss..."

I'm browsing right now...

om my Mew7on. 1 love this cool hamb writing pecognition. 1 think Cndr Taco yses one to post 5lashdot stories.

Link to the comic

a memorable Doonesbury strip by Gary Trudeau effectively doomed the device.

The Comic [ucomics.com]

=-Jippy

Newton Won't Die?

Neither will this stack of old 386's in my office. I really wish they would die, and then conveniently decompose.

Newton ahead of its time.

We have a couple Newtons here in our company, and my brother recently resurrected his from the shelf. The handwriting recognition is out of this world. How it recognizes print or cursive is just amazing. Text to speech was actually useful (and used, might I add). The database for contacts was extensible. The cross references between messages/notes/contacts, etc. was very fast and intuitive.

The only issue we had with it was the synchronization capabilities. Apparently, it syncs quite well with Mac apps; however, that's one thing we don't have here.

Hell, we were just talking about this yesterday -- we wish they'd bring it back. The Newton platform is really nice. To me, its somewhere between Palm OS and CE (for those that wish to compare).

All PDA's have died

Since they stopped supporting the same PCMCIA cards that my laptop uses -- and relying on grafitti rather than a keyboard.

I remember my HP 200LX back in the stone age. I could pop the modem out of my laptop and dial up and run telnet sessions and check email -- all the while saving out to the (albeit expensive at the time) 4 meg CF card. I did this all on a regular (albeit small) keyboard. All of this and it rode on my hip -- and the batteries lasted for days. Ever since then PDA's have gone downhill for all I care.

Disneyland still uses them

Disneyland still uses Newtons for surveys, or at least they did a year and a half ago when I got married and went on my honeymoon there (she had a 5 year old, which became my five year old, so a honeymoon there made sense).
I used to own a Newton 120, and tried to find it a while ago. It's buried deep somewhere.

Hardware that won't (quite) die

And I thought Amigans were never-say-die fanatics.

Ebay here I come!

Cool, now I know what to do with these dudes wasting away my drawer, one mans junk (another's ebay treasure!)

Great programming environment

I played with Newton development [eskimo.com] and it was a truly great development environment. The NewtonScript Programming Language [apple.com], influenced by Self [sun.com], is a a beautiful, elegant language based on prototypes. The view system, which runs the display, makes it really easy to to customize user interfaces. The Newton Toolkit [mactech.com] in it's day was a ground breaking IDE. Newton supported persistant objects.

The Newton group actually thought about and did user testing on their interface, then published interface standards. Unlike most OSes

Sigh. I spend so much of my professional life dealing with poorly thought out languages/systems that I look back very fondly on the Newton.

Actually I still use two of them. One is in the kitchen - I use it to keep track of groceries I need. The other sits by my desktop machine for taking notes.

Good Technology

does not ensure success, sadly. Things I thought should have done better than they did (for whatever reason they failed to find sucess):

1. Newton (Owned one and loved it.)
2. NeXTStep on PCs
3. BeOS
4. Amiga
5. Hypercard/Hypertalk (A fun programming language)
6. Magic Cap OS
7. DR DOS
8. Betamax (the death of which was recently announced)
9. G4 Cube

BTW, I thought that the Newton's interface a awesome but has anyone ever heard of or seen what a color version of the interface might have looked like?

Good technology doesn't always win...

Palm realised that the time wasn't right for expensive PDAs, the Newton was over-engineered for the early 90s. Palm invented graffiti as it was easier and cheaper to get the user to learn something than add full handwriting recog to the device. In a way it's better having a company like Palm producing popular PDAs instead of one of the big players like Microsoft and Apple. Politics make the IT industry boring.

Still got mine, still use it

I actually chose the MP2000 because of the larger size, though I could do with less weight, because I was interested in note-taking.

When I went to a startup a few years back, it was our first computer. It sent and recieved faxes, sent and recieved e-mail, and I used the HWR to take the notes of the first Board of Director's meetings. (And yes, they were readable afterwards.)

Damn you, Slashdot!

I was just thinking I could get by with a Palm or a Handspring, and you have to go and run a story about the Newton. Thanks a lot.

*loads up eBay*

Oh well, here's an older story [slashdot.org] from the last time I was on a Newton trip.

Good example of PDA

The people behind Newton's visaon were thrully visionaries: they created a device that after 4 years of "death" still can be used almost effortless.

Maybe people at Apple and other shops can learn something really valuable from the Newton comunity: any device is only "as strong" as their supporters.

And by the way if any of you are actually designing the next generation of PDA, either for Sony or for Palm, please fell free to "copy" all the best points of Newton :
excel handwriting recon soft, pc-card interfaces and easy of use.
And mix all the new features the users hope for in a PDA naoadays : MP3 playback, color display ( maybe some extensible roolup OLED screen, for a big presentation of web pages ).

There's a market for it, of course..

Just like they do a good business refurbishing and reusing the original LapTop. the Tandy Model 100.

Heck, it came with a 300 baud modem!

I'm still carrying my Newton 2100...

and yes it's huge compared to a Palm Pilot/Handspring Visor, but it lets me enter pretty fast, hadnwriting works fine for me once it learned how I write (the reverse of Graffiti, where you get to learn how to write the way it needs you to). I can use the backlighting as an emergency flashlight. What I need to do is figure out how to convert the data from the backups to a format readable by other systems. What I really want to do is export my contact list from my Newton to my iPod, but I haven't taken the time to research the intermediate steps. u

What does a Newton's HWR make of l33t?

Hm, what does a Newton's hand writing recognition make of someone writing in l33t ?

Sony Vaio U1: Other than battery life (2.5-4 hrs)

The new Sony Vaio U1 ultrasmall notebook machines are the Cat's Ass!

http://www.dynamism.com/u1/index.shtml

Real PC Real Small: 29 oz And that's ok because if your PDA doesn't actually fit in your pocket it doesn't matter how large it really is.

PDAs are still needed?

what most people need is now called an iPod. Contacts, calendars and MP3s. What more gadgets do you need?

Newton Rocks!!

The rosetta technology used by newton and now inkwell is leaps and bounds ahead of what anyone was doing then or is doing now in the handwriting recognition field. It puts Graffiti to shame :)

Sadly, it was my only excuse to keep OS9 around...

...until I found an App called NewTen, which allows me to load software onto my MP120. Not bad.

I'd really like something that would allow me to backup the internal memory and flash card to my Mac, but oh well.

This Newton was almost free, I traded a MP100 for it. Way better software than 1.3.

Nostalgia City

Run OS/2 on a Newton and load it up with Amiga software.

I still use my 2100 daily

When I was at university in 95 a local Apple dealer was selling off the first gen Newts at a bargain price (they had two huge boxes of them from an auction). They were selling like hot-cakes, and despite being left-handed and with scrappy handwriting, I figured I would give it a try as I could always sell it on to another student at cost.

I'd tried dozens of PDAs over the years, and they'd all fallen by the wayside. The Newt's OS, however, was so well designed and intergrated that it made it a joy to use. The recognition on that device was about 80-90% on my scrawl, which was enough for it to be usable for entering names, addresses and the like.

On leaving university and earning some real money, I went and checked out all the latest PDAs - and concluded that none of them were a patch on the Newt in UI terms. So I bought myself a 2100.

The UI in the later Newts is so well thought out that I still haven't found anything to compare (as a PDA rather than as a portable media player, which seems to be the current trend). The synching software sucks, but the Newton OS is rock solid, and has never lost a single byte of data.

Every morning my Newt wakes up at 6:30 and a piercing alarm goes off. I hit the power switch and it snoozes. At 6:40 it silently wakes up and picks up my emails and newsgroups before going back to sleep. At 7:00 the alarm clock snooze times out and it wakes me up properly. I then lie in bed reading my emails.

I go through this every day, yet it only needs about 1 hour's charging every week or two. And if I have to travel, I have the option of using standard AA batteries, or even a solar panel! In fact, they are so efficient that Trevor Bayliss (Mr. Clockwork Radio himself) once demonstrated an eMate modified to run on clockwork.

It will print to most parallel port printers (via an adaptor) or over IR to a suitable printer. With an extra bit of software you can beam data to and from a Palm. You can even run a web server on it in case you need to view your contacts or diary from elsewhere on your network.

I really wish they'd released a smaller version as a companion to the 2100. I would have bought both, as the size of the Newt is sometimes a problem. Generally, though, I like the large size as it makes data entry so much more practical.

With the 2100 (and possibly 2000) the Newt was really starting to deliver on its early promise. If I'd been Steve Jobs, I would have fixed the synch software to make it more intuitive and work better over IR, then offered bundle deals with the original iMac (which also had IR and came out around that time). The iMac would be the "family" computer, the 2100 for Dad, something similar (in translucent) for Mum, and eMates for the kids. All able to beam data between each other and the iMac.

Active Waba development on Newton ensures future

There is a development group [gmu.edu] working on a port of Waba [wabasoft.com] for the Newton. Waba is a Java'ish environment that is aimed at small platforms like PDA's. By porting this environment to the Newton, this group is making continued development on the Newton feasible for those who can't get the old Newton Development software. It also bouys up Newton development by providing an expanding market for the resulting software to the developer because the code will work on many other platforms (and PDA's) as well. In addition most third party Waba software that was written by those who aren't necessarily targeting the Newton platform, will, nonetheless, work on the Newton.

Unfortunately, this wonderful work is not much good to me because my third, and only functional Newton is just barely functional. It is so delicate that moving it around causes complete system failure. It's fine on my desktop, but I can't take it with me, which defeats the purpose. of having a PDA! Getting yet another replacement has become increasingly difficult and expensive. Consequently, I've switched to an iPAQ running the SavaJe [savaje.com] operating sytem. At least that supports a FULL J2SE (Java) environment so there are lots of applications that I can run on it.

Best of luck to those WabaNewtDev [yahoo.com] folks out there. If you're a Newton enthusiast, you should definitely consider supporting these folks. They do great stuff!

still many amiga computer clubs around

This technology saw last light at least a decade ago and still has its fans. Slashdot periodically runs stories about the imminent ressurection of AMiga.

Thriving market

A quick search on eBay [ebay.com] shows a thriving market and some fairly high prices (considering auction prices tend to balloon in the few hours before they close). I sold my 2100 on eBay for over $400 about a year ago. It seems significant to me that these machines still fetch more in the used market than most new PDAs. Had Apple continued making them, they probably could have hit that price point by now.

802.11 + Newton = Gold

Well, Silver, at least... WaveLan Silver :)

Just before I went in for gall bladder surgery this month, I picked up a WaveLan Silver card. I grabbed the 802.11 Newton software that's out there, and in no time, had a handheld Newton 2100 web browser and telnet box.

For the first few days aafter the surgery, it was too uncomfortable to even have my iBook in my lap, so I satisfied my geeky urges propped up in bed with my wireless Newton :) (I should mention that I had it with me at the hospital - surgery was done around 5 pm, and by 5 am, I was playing chess in my recovery room on the Newton :D )

What I want is...

...something the size of a Psion Series 5 (or slightly larger at a pinch) with a useable mini keyboard (I can type nearly as fast on my S5 as on a regular keyboard, though admittedly with more errors), colour screen, headphone jack (for all the MP3s I'd be fitting on the...), hard drive (rather than CF cards), a USB and/or Firewire port, mini-office suite and Mac compatibility. Networking, wireless, etc are all secondary to me - I can wait until I can get home and link the thing up to my Mac - but I'm sure some people would want them. Now, which company could possibly produce something like that? Gee, I dunno. One named after some kind of fruit, perhaps... They won't admit to it, but I'll bet Apple are working on something for this sector of the market. Jobs says he hates PDAs - no problem, this isn't one!

Re:What do you expect?

Jobs wasn't there when the Newton came out, and he's the one who ended Newton when he came in as iCEO in the late 90s.

I know you're a troll, but you're a stupid troll.

Re:What do you expect?

Apple users are cultist fanatics who buy anything Jobs blesses.

Yes, that explains the phenomenal success of the Power Mac G4 Cube.

Re:What do you expect?

Actually Jobs wasn't a driving force behind the Newton.

John Scully championed the early PDA as the CEO of Apple during its introduction. Michael Tchao, Steve Capps, and Walter Smith were among the team members who worked with the OS and Stepan Pachikov developed the cursive recognition technology know then as Calligrapher.

Re:What do you expect?

The HWR system then known as CalliGrapher is still known as CalliGrapher [paragraph.com] today, also under the name Microsoft Transcriber on PocketPC and PenOffice on desktop Windoze. At Newton OS 2, Apple dumped the then fairly buggy CalliGrapher, and used their own recognizers that were better, and now found in OS X as Inkwell. CalliGrapher has shaped up in years since, and is pretty decent on PocketPC. CG6 on PocketPC is nowhere near as integrated as Newton HWR was on the Newton OS 2.x, but it beats using a character recognizer any day of the week. :)

Re:Beat up martin

I think it was "Eat up martha"

Re:This is great

i live in newton (MA, that is) and own a MP 130. it is not currently working, however, and i am unsure what is wrong. So, that makes, uh, one?