Games - Apple Newton

Home > Listing Index > Games > Apple Newton

	Games - Apple Newton

The Apple Newton, or simply Newton, was an early line of personal digital assistants developed, manufactured and marketed by Apple Computer from 1993 to 1998. The original Newtons were based on the ARM 610 RISC processor, and featured handwriting recognition. Apple's official name for the device was MessagePad; the term Newton was Apple's name for the operating system it used, but popular usage of the word Newton has grown to include the device and its software together.

The Newton in development

The Newton project was not originally intended to produce a PDA. The PDA category did not exist for most of Newton's genesis, and the "personal digital assistant" moniker itself was coined relatively late in the development cycle by Apple's then-CEO John Sculley, the driving force behind the project. Newton was, in fact, 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 a rich object-oriented graphics kernel. One of the original motivating scenarios 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.

For a portion of the Newton's development cycle (roughly the middle third ), the project's primary programming language was Dylan, 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 was a tough sell for the large-format Newton (and for a development team unused to Lisp programming). With the move to the smaller form factor, Dylan was relegated to experimental status in the "Bauhaus Project" and eventually cancelled outright. Had it been retained, Dylan, with garbage collection and close OS integration, would have preceded Microsoft's managed code revolution by over a decade.

The project missed by far its original goals to reinvent personal computing, and then to rewrite contemporary application programming. The Newton project's broad vision fell victim to project slippage, feature creep, and a growing fear that it would interfere with Macintosh sales. It was reinvented as a PDA which would be a complementary Macintosh peripheral instead of a stand-alone computer which might compete with the Macintosh.

Technical details

Newton used an advanced object-oriented programming system called NewtonScript, developed by Apple employee Walter Smith . One of the major complaints programmers had was that the Toolbox programming environment was overpriced at $1000 (later in the life of the Newton, the programming environment was made available free of charge). Additionally, it required learning a new way of programming. Despite this, many third party and shareware applications were (and continue to be) available for Newton. It has been suggested that the NewtonScript programming system should be made available open-source, as abandonware.

Data in Newton was stored in object-oriented databases known as soups. One of the revolutionary aspects of Newton was that soups were available to all programs; and programs could operate cross-soup; meaning that the calendar could refer to names in the address book; a note in the notepad could be converted to an appointment, and so forth; and the soups could be programmer-extended - a new address book enhancement could be built on the data from the existing address book.

While the soup concept worked remarkably well within the Newton system itself, it caused several usability issues. First, it made it extremely difficult to synchronize data with other systems, like a desktop Macintosh or PC, making the Newton a data island. Apple's utility to perform this task, the Newton Connection Utility, was exceedingly complex and was never completed to perform to the satisfaction of most users. The realization that a handheld computer needed to work within the existing data environment of its users was key to the success of the later Palm Pilot platform, even though the Palm was technically inferior.

The second consequence of the data-object soup was that objects could extend built-in applications such as the address book so seamlessly that Newton users could not distinguish which program or add-on object was responsible for the various features on their own system. 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 were tossed in the "Storage" area of the "Extras" drawer. There was 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. There was no easy way to get a listing of all user-installed objects on a system.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Apple Newton ]

Games - Apple Newton

The Newton in development

Technical details

Searches on eBay

Related searches on eBay