Everything about The Apple Newton totally explained
The
Apple Newton, or simply
Newton, was an early line of
personal digital assistants developed and marketed by
Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) from 1993 to 1998. Some electronic engineering and the manufacture of the Newton was done in Japan by
Sharp. The original Newtons were based on the
ARM 610 RISC processor and featured
handwriting recognition software. Apple's official name for the device was "MessagePad"; the term "Newton" was Apple's name for the operating system it used (
Newton OS), but popular usage of the word
Newton has grown to include the device and its software together. The name is an allusion to
Isaac Newton's apple.
The Newton in development
The Newton project wasn't originally intended to produce a PDA. The PDA category didn't exist for most of Newton's genesis, and the "
personal digital assistant" term itself was coined relatively late in the development cycle by Apple's then-CEO
John Sculley, 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 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.
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 which had garbage collection, tight integration with the "soup" storage and user-interface toolkit, and was specifically designed to run in small RAM/large ROM environments.
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 which would be a complementary Macintosh peripheral instead of a stand-alone computer which might compete with the Macintosh.
Product Details
Application software
The Newton was pre-loaded with a variety of software to aid 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 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.
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Further Information
Get more info on 'Apple Newton'.
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